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a4a9692d 1 Building and Installing Emacs
3dfbc6d8 2 on Windows NT/2K/XP and Windows 95/98/ME
a4a9692d 3
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4 Copyright (C) 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006
5 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
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6 See the end of the file for copying permissions.
7
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8* For the impatient
9
10 Here are the concise instructions for configuring and building the
11 native Win32 binary of Emacs on Windows, for those who want to skip
12 the complex explanations and ``just do it'':
13
14 1. Change to the `nt' directory (the directory of this file):
15
16 cd nt
17
18 2. Run configure.bat. From the COMMAND.COM/CMD.EXE command prompt:
19
20 configure
21
22 from a Unixy shell prompt:
23
24 cmd /c configure.bat
25 or
26 command.com /c configure.bat
27
28 3. Run the Make utility suitable for your environment. If you build
29 with the Microsoft's Visual C compiler:
30
31 nmake
32
33 For the development environments based on GNU GCC (MinGW, MSYS,
34 Cygwin), depending on how Make is called, it could be:
35
36 make
37 or
38 gnumake
39 or
40 gmake
41
42 (If you are building from CVS, say "make bootstrap" or "nmake
43 bootstrap" instead.)
44
45 4. Generate the Info manuals (only if you are building out of CVS):
46
47 make info
48
49 (change "make" to "nmake" if you use MSVC).
50
51 5. Install the produced binaries:
52
53 make install
54
55 That's it!
56
57 If these short instructions somehow fail, read the rest of this
58 file.
59
60* Preliminaries
61
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62 If you used WinZip to unpack the distribution, we suggest to
63 remove the files and unpack again with a different program!
64 WinZip is known to create some subtle and hard to debug problems,
177c0ea7 65 such as converting files to DOS CR-LF format, not creating empty
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66 directories, etc. We suggest to use djtarnt.exe from the GNU FTP
67 site.
68
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69 If you are building out of CVS, then some files in this directory
70 (.bat files, nmake.defs and makefile.w32-in) may need the line-ends
71 fixing first. The easiest way to do this and avoid future conflicts
72 is to run the following command in this (emacs/nt) directory:
591cbed1 73
589a591b 74 cvs update -kb
591cbed1 75
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76 Alternatively, use programs that convert end-of-line format, such as
77 dos2unix and unix2dos available from GnuWin32 or dtou and utod from
78 the DJGPP project.
591cbed1 79
1040d041 80 In addition to this file, you should also read INSTALL.CVS in the
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81 parent directory, and make sure that you have a version of
82 "touch.exe" in your path, and that it will create files that do not
83 yet exist.
589a591b 84
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85* Supported development environments
86
da179dd0 87 To compile Emacs, you will need either Microsoft Visual C++ 2.0 or
bd7bdff8 88 later and nmake, or a Windows port of GCC 2.95 or later with MinGW
6c72c0c7 89 and W32 API support and a port of GNU Make. You can use the Cygwin
bd7bdff8 90 ports of GCC, but Emacs requires the MinGW headers and libraries to
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91 build (latest versions of the Cygwin toolkit, at least since v1.3.3,
92 include the MinGW headers and libraries as an integral part).
da179dd0 93
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94 The rest of this file assumes you have a working development
95 environment. If you just installed such an environment, try
96 building a trivial C "Hello world" program, and see if it works. If
97 it doesn't work, resolve that problem first!
98
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99 If you use the MinGW port of GCC and GNU Make to build Emacs, there
100 are some compatibility issues wrt Make and the shell that is run by
101 Make, either the standard COMMAND.COM/CMD.EXE supplied with Windows
102 or sh.exe., a port of a Unixy shell. For reference, here is a list
103 of which builds of GNU Make are known to work or not, and whether
104 they work in the presence and/or absence of sh.exe, the Cygwin port
105 of Bash. Note that any version of Make that is compiled with Cygwin
106 will only work with Cygwin tools, due to the use of cygwin style
107 paths. This means Cygwin Make is unsuitable for building parts of
108 Emacs that need to invoke Emacs itself (leim and "make bootstrap",
109 for example). Also see the Trouble-shooting section below if you
110 decide to go ahead and use Cygwin make.
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111
112 In addition, using 4NT as your shell is known to fail the build process,
6c72c0c7 113 at least for 4NT version 3.01. Use CMD.EXE, the default Windows shell,
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114 instead. MSYS sh.exe also appears to cause various problems. If you have
115 MSYS installed, try "make SHELL=cmd.exe" to force the use of cmd.exe
116 instead of sh.exe.
177c0ea7 117
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118 sh exists no sh
119
fc813ef6 120 cygwin b20.1 make (3.75): fails[1, 5] fails[2, 5]
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121 MSVC compiled gmake 3.77: okay okay
122 MSVC compiled gmake 3.78.1: okay okay
123 MSVC compiled gmake 3.79.1: okay okay
bf95665f 124 mingw32/gcc-2.92.2 make (3.77): okay okay[4]
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125 cygwin compiled gmake 3.77: fails[1, 5] fails[2, 5]
126 cygwin compiled make 3.78.1: fails[5] fails[2, 5]
127 cygwin compiled make 3.79.1: fails[3, 5] fails[2?, 5]
177c0ea7 128 mingw32 compiled make 3.79.1: okay okay
591cbed1 129 mingw32 compiled make 3.80: okay unknown[6]
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130
131 Notes:
132
133 [1] doesn't cope with makefiles with DOS line endings, so must mount
134 emacs source with text!=binary.
135 [2] fails when needs to invoke shell commands; okay invoking gcc etc.
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136 [3] requires LC_MESSAGES support to build; cannot build with early
137 versions of cygwin.
4bcec9a2 138 [4] may fail on Windows 9X and Windows ME; if so, install Bash.
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139 [5] fails when building leim due to the use of cygwin style paths.
140 May work if building emacs without leim.
591cbed1 141 [6] please report if you try this combination.
4bcec9a2 142
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143 Other compilers may work, but specific reports from people that have
144 tried suggest that the Intel C compiler (for example) may produce an
145 Emacs executable with strange filename completion behaviour. Unless
146 you would like to assist by finding and fixing the cause of any bugs
147 like this, we recommend the use of the supported compilers mentioned
148 in the previous paragraph.
149
150 You will also need a copy of the Posix cp, rm and mv programs. These
151 and other useful Posix utilities can be obtained from one of several
152 projects:
153
0939da72 154 * http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/ ( GnuWin32 )
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155 * http://www.mingw.org/ ( MinGW )
156 * http://www.cygwin.com/ ( Cygwin )
157 * http://unxutils.sourceforge.net/ ( UnxUtils )
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158
159 If you build Emacs on Windows 9X or ME, not on Windows 2K/XP or
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160 Windows NT, we suggest to install the Cygwin port of Bash. That is
161 because the native Windows shell COMMAND.COM is too limited; the
162 Emacs build procedure tries very hard to support even such limited
163 shells, but as none of the Windows developers of Emacs work on
164 Windows 9x, we cannot guarantee that it works without a more
165 powerful shell.
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166
167 Additional instructions and help for building Emacs on Windows can be
168 found at the Emacs Wiki:
169
0939da72 170 http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/WThirtyTwoInstallationKit
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171
172 and at this URL:
173
0939da72 174 http://ourcomments.org/Emacs/w32-build-emacs.html
6c72c0c7 175
6d76a603 176* Configuring
a4a9692d 177
da179dd0 178 Configuration of Emacs is now handled by running configure.bat in the
0939da72 179 `nt' subdirectory. It will detect which compiler you have available,
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180 and generate makefiles accordingly. You can override the compiler
181 detection, and control optimization and debug settings, by specifying
182 options on the command line when invoking configure.
a4a9692d 183
da179dd0 184 To configure Emacs to build with GCC or MSVC, whichever is available,
0939da72 185 simply change to the `nt' subdirectory and run `configure.bat' with no
da179dd0 186 options. To see what options are available, run `configure --help'.
a4a9692d 187
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188 N.B. It is normal to see a few error messages output while configure
189 is running, when gcc support is being tested. These cannot be
190 surpressed because of limitations in the Windows 9x command.com shell.
191
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192 You are encouraged to look at the file config.log which shows details
193 for failed tests, after configure.bat finishes. Any unexplained failure
194 should be investigated and perhaps reported as a bug (see the section
195 about reporting bugs in the file README in this directory and in the
196 Emacs manual).
197
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198* Optional image library support
199
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200 In addition to its "native" image formats (pbm and xbm), Emacs can
201 handle other image types: xpm, tiff, gif, png and jpeg (postscript is
202 currently unsupported on Windows). To build Emacs with support for
203 them, the corresponding headers must be in the include path when the
204 configure script is run. This can be setup using environment
205 variables, or by specifying --cflags -I... options on the command-line
206 to configure.bat. The configure script will report whether it was
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207 able to detect the headers. If the results of this testing appear to be
208 incorrect, please look for details in the file config.log: it will show
209 the failed test programs and compiler error messages that should explain
210 what is wrong. (Usually, any such failures happen because some headers
211 are missing due to bad packaging of the image support libraries.)
bfd889ed 212
3dfbc6d8 213 To use the external image support, the DLLs implementing the
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214 functionality must be found when Emacs first needs them, either on the
215 PATH, or in the same directory as emacs.exe. Failure to find a
216 library is not an error; the associated image format will simply be
217 unavailable. Note that once Emacs has determined that a library can
218 not be found, there's no way to force it to try again, other than
219 restarting. See the variable `image-library-alist' to configure the
220 expected names of the libraries.
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221
222 Some image libraries have dependencies on one another, or on zlib.
223 For example, tiff support depends on the jpeg library. If you did not
224 compile the libraries yourself, you must make sure that any dependency
225 is in the PATH or otherwise accesible and that the binaries are
226 compatible (for example, that they were built with the same compiler).
227
228 Binaries for the image libraries (among many others) can be found at
bd7bdff8 229 the GnuWin32 project. These are built with MinGW, but they can be
591cbed1 230 used with both GCC/MinGW and MSVC builds of Emacs. See the info on
68dafa7a 231 http://ourcomments.org/Emacs/EmacsW32.html for more details about
591cbed1 232 installing image support libraries.
bfd889ed 233
6d76a603 234* Building
a4a9692d 235
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236 After running configure, simply run the appropriate `make' program for
237 your compiler to build Emacs. For MSVC, this is nmake; for GCC, it is
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238 GNU make. (If you are building out of CVS, say "make bootstrap" or
239 "nmake bootstrap" instead.)
a4a9692d 240
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241 As the files are compiled, you will see some warning messages
242 declaring that some functions don't return a value, or that some data
243 conversions will be lossy, etc. You can safely ignore these messages.
244 The warnings may be fixed in the main FSF source at some point, but
245 until then we will just live with them.
a4a9692d 246
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247 If you are building from CVS, the following commands will produce
248 the Info manuals (which are not part of the CVS repository):
249
250 make info
251 or
252 nmake info
253
6d76a603 254* Installing
a4a9692d 255
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256 To install Emacs after it has compiled, simply run `nmake install'
257 or `make install', depending on which version of the Make utility
258 do you have.
a4a9692d 259
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260 By default, Emacs will be installed in the location where it was
261 built, but a different location can be specified either using the
262 --prefix option to configure, or by setting INSTALL_DIR when running
263 make, like so:
a4a9692d 264
da179dd0 265 make install INSTALL_DIR=D:/emacs
a4a9692d 266
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267 (for `nmake', type "nmake install INSTALL_DIR=D:/emacs" instead).
268
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269 The install process will run addpm to setup the registry entries, and
270 to create a Start menu icon for Emacs.
a4a9692d 271
6d76a603 272* Trouble-shooting
a4a9692d 273
da179dd0 274 The main problems that are likely to be encountered when building
bd7bdff8 275 Emacs stem from using an old version of GCC, or old MinGW or W32 API
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276 headers. Additionally, cygwin ports of GNU make may require the Emacs
277 source tree to be mounted with text!=binary, because the makefiles
278 generated by configure.bat necessarily use DOS line endings. Also,
279 cygwin ports of make must run in UNIX mode, either by specifying
280 --unix on the command line, or MAKE_MODE=UNIX in the environment.
a4a9692d 281
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282 When configure runs, it attempts to detect when GCC itself, or the
283 headers it is using, are not suitable for building Emacs. GCC version
284 2.95 or later is needed, because that is when the Windows port gained
285 sufficient support for anonymous structs and unions to cope with some
286 definitions from winnt.h that are used by addsection.c. The W32 API
287 headers that come with Cygwin b20.1 are incomplete, and do not include
288 some definitions required by addsection.c, for instance. Also, older
289 releases of the W32 API headers from Anders Norlander contain a typo
290 in the definition of IMAGE_FIRST_SECTION in winnt.h, which
291 addsection.c relies on. Versions of w32api-xxx.zip from at least
292 1999-11-18 onwards are okay.
a4a9692d 293
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294 When in doubt about correctness of what configure did, look at the file
295 config.log, which shows all the failed test programs and compiler
296 messages associated with the failures. If that doesn't give a clue,
297 please report the problems, together with the relevant fragments from
298 config.log, as bugs.
299
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300 If configure succeeds, but make fails, install the Cygwin port of
301 Bash, even if the table above indicates that Emacs should be able to
302 build without sh.exe. (Some versions of Windows shells are too dumb
303 for Makefile's used by Emacs.)
304
8481e41e 305 If you are using certain Cygwin builds of GCC, such as Cygwin version
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306 1.1.8, you may need to specify some extra compiler flags like so:
307
308 configure --with-gcc --cflags -mwin32 --cflags -D__MSVCRT__
315746cc 309 --ldflags -mwin32
6d76a603 310
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311 However, the latest Cygwin versions, such as 1.3.3, don't need those
312 switches; you can simply use "configure --with-gcc".
313
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314 We will attempt to auto-detect the need for these flags in a future
315 release.
316
317* Debugging
a4a9692d 318
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319 You should be able to debug Emacs using the debugger that is
320 appropriate for the compiler you used, namely DevStudio or Windbg if
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321 compiled with MSVC, or GDB if compiled with GCC.
322
323 When Emacs aborts due to a fatal internal error, Emacs on Windows
324 pops up an Emacs Abort Dialog asking you whether you want to debug
325 Emacs or terminate it. If Emacs was built with MSVC, click YES
326 twice, and Windbg or the DevStudio debugger will start up
327 automatically. If Emacs was built with GCC, first start GDB and
328 attach it to the Emacs process with the "gdb -p EMACS-PID" command,
329 where EMACS-PID is the Emacs process ID (which you can see in the
330 Windows Task Manager), type the "continue" command inside GDB, and
331 only then click YES on the abort dialog. This will pass control to
332 the debugger, and you will be able to debug the cause of the fatal
333 error.
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334
335 Emacs functions implemented in C use a naming convention that reflects
336 their names in lisp. The names of the C routines are the lisp names
337 prefixed with 'F', and with dashes converted to underscores. For
338 example, the function call-process is implemented in C by
339 Fcall_process. Similarly, lisp variables are prefixed with 'V', again
340 with dashes converted to underscores. These conventions enable you to
341 easily set breakpoints or examine familiar lisp variables by name.
342
343 Since Emacs data is often in the form of a lisp object, and the
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344 Lisp_Object type is difficult to examine manually in a debugger,
345 Emacs provides a helper routine called debug_print that prints out a
346 readable representation of a Lisp_Object. If you are using GDB,
347 there is a .gdbinit file in the src directory which provides
348 definitions that are useful for examining lisp objects. Therefore,
349 the following tips are mainly of interest when using MSVC.
350
351 The output from debug_print is sent to stderr, and to the debugger
352 via the OutputDebugString routine. The output sent to stderr should
353 be displayed in the console window that was opened when the
354 emacs.exe executable was started. The output sent to the debugger
355 should be displayed in its "Debug" output window.
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356
357 When you are in the process of debugging Emacs and you would like to
358 examine the contents of a Lisp_Object variable, popup the QuickWatch
359 window (QuickWatch has an eyeglass symbol on its button in the
360 toolbar). In the text field at the top of the window, enter
361 debug_print(<variable>) and hit return. For example, start and run
362 Emacs in the debugger until it is waiting for user input. Then click
363 on the Break button in the debugger to halt execution. Emacs should
364 halt in ZwUserGetMessage waiting for an input event. Use the Call
365 Stack window to select the procedure w32_msp_pump up the call stack
366 (see below for why you have to do this). Open the QuickWatch window
367 and enter debug_print(Vexec_path). Evaluating this expression will
368 then print out the contents of the lisp variable exec-path.
369
370 If QuickWatch reports that the symbol is unknown, then check the call
371 stack in the Call Stack window. If the selected frame in the call
372 stack is not an Emacs procedure, then the debugger won't recognize
373 Emacs symbols. Instead, select a frame that is inside an Emacs
374 procedure and try using debug_print again.
375
376 If QuickWatch invokes debug_print but nothing happens, then check the
377 thread that is selected in the debugger. If the selected thread is
378 not the last thread to run (the "current" thread), then it cannot be
379 used to execute debug_print. Use the Debug menu to select the current
380 thread and try using debug_print again. Note that the debugger halts
381 execution (e.g., due to a breakpoint) in the context of the current
382 thread, so this should only be a problem if you've explicitly switched
383 threads.
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384
385COPYING PERMISSIONS
386
387 Permission is granted to anyone to make or distribute verbatim copies
388 of this document as received, in any medium, provided that the
389 copyright notice and permission notice are preserved,
390 and that the distributor grants the recipient permission
391 for further redistribution as permitted by this notice.
392
393 Permission is granted to distribute modified versions
394 of this document, or of portions of it,
395 under the above conditions, provided also that they
396 carry prominent notices stating who last changed them,
397 and that any new or changed statements about the activities
398 of the Free Software Foundation are approved by the Foundation.