| 1 | Building and Installing Emacs |
| 2 | on Windows NT/2K/XP and Windows 95/98/ME |
| 3 | |
| 4 | Copyright (C) 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007 |
| 5 | Free Software Foundation, Inc. |
| 6 | See the end of the file for copying permissions. |
| 7 | |
| 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 - but see notes about Cygwin make below), depending on how |
| 35 | Make is called, it could be: |
| 36 | |
| 37 | make |
| 38 | or |
| 39 | mingw32-make |
| 40 | or |
| 41 | gnumake |
| 42 | or |
| 43 | gmake |
| 44 | |
| 45 | (If you are building from CVS, say "make bootstrap" or "nmake |
| 46 | bootstrap" instead, and avoid using Cygwin make.) |
| 47 | |
| 48 | With GNU Make, you can use the -j command-line option to have |
| 49 | Make execute several commands at once, like this: |
| 50 | |
| 51 | gmake -j 2 XMFLAGS="-j 2" |
| 52 | |
| 53 | The XMFLAGS variable overrides the default behavior of GNU Make |
| 54 | on Windows, whereby recursive Make invocations reset the maximum |
| 55 | number of simultaneous commands to 1. The above command allows |
| 56 | up to 4 simultaneous commands at once in the top-level Make, and |
| 57 | up to 3 in each one of the recursive Make's. |
| 58 | |
| 59 | 4. Generate the Info manuals (only if you are building out of CVS, and |
| 60 | if you have makeinfo.exe installed): |
| 61 | |
| 62 | make info |
| 63 | |
| 64 | (change "make" to "nmake" if you use MSVC). |
| 65 | |
| 66 | 5. Install the produced binaries: |
| 67 | |
| 68 | make install |
| 69 | |
| 70 | That's it! |
| 71 | |
| 72 | If these short instructions somehow fail, read the rest of this |
| 73 | file. |
| 74 | |
| 75 | * Preliminaries |
| 76 | |
| 77 | If you used WinZip to unpack the distribution, we suggest to |
| 78 | remove the files and unpack again with a different program! |
| 79 | WinZip is known to create some subtle and hard to debug problems, |
| 80 | such as converting files to DOS CR-LF format, not creating empty |
| 81 | directories, etc. We suggest to use djtarnt.exe from the GNU FTP |
| 82 | site. |
| 83 | |
| 84 | If you are building out of CVS, then some files in this directory |
| 85 | (.bat files, nmake.defs and makefile.w32-in) may need the line-ends |
| 86 | fixing first. The easiest way to do this and avoid future conflicts |
| 87 | is to run the following command in this (emacs/nt) directory: |
| 88 | |
| 89 | cvs update -kb |
| 90 | |
| 91 | Alternatively, use programs that convert end-of-line format, such as |
| 92 | dos2unix and unix2dos available from GnuWin32 or dtou and utod from |
| 93 | the DJGPP project. |
| 94 | |
| 95 | In addition to this file, you should also read INSTALL.CVS in the |
| 96 | parent directory, and make sure that you have a version of |
| 97 | "touch.exe" in your path, and that it will create files that do not |
| 98 | yet exist. |
| 99 | |
| 100 | * Supported development environments |
| 101 | |
| 102 | To compile Emacs, you will need either Microsoft Visual C++ 2.0 or |
| 103 | later and nmake, or a Windows port of GCC 2.95 or later with MinGW |
| 104 | and W32 API support and a port of GNU Make. You can use the Cygwin |
| 105 | ports of GCC, but Emacs requires the MinGW headers and libraries to |
| 106 | build (latest versions of the Cygwin toolkit, at least since v1.3.3, |
| 107 | include the MinGW headers and libraries as an integral part). |
| 108 | |
| 109 | Note that building Emacs with Visual Studio 2005 is not supported at |
| 110 | this time. |
| 111 | |
| 112 | The rest of this file assumes you have a working development |
| 113 | environment. If you just installed such an environment, try |
| 114 | building a trivial C "Hello world" program, and see if it works. If |
| 115 | it doesn't work, resolve that problem first! |
| 116 | |
| 117 | If you use the MinGW port of GCC and GNU Make to build Emacs, there |
| 118 | are some compatibility issues wrt Make and the shell that is run by |
| 119 | Make, either the standard COMMAND.COM/CMD.EXE supplied with Windows |
| 120 | or sh.exe., a port of a Unixy shell. For reference, below is a list |
| 121 | of which builds of GNU Make are known to work or not, and whether |
| 122 | they work in the presence and/or absence of sh.exe, the Cygwin port |
| 123 | of Bash. Note that any version of Make that is compiled with Cygwin |
| 124 | will only work with Cygwin tools, due to the use of cygwin style |
| 125 | paths. This means Cygwin Make is unsuitable for building parts of |
| 126 | Emacs that need to invoke Emacs itself (leim and "make bootstrap", |
| 127 | for example). Also see the Trouble-shooting section below if you |
| 128 | decide to go ahead and use Cygwin make. |
| 129 | |
| 130 | In addition, using 4NT as your shell is known to fail the build process, |
| 131 | at least for 4NT version 3.01. Use CMD.EXE, the default Windows shell, |
| 132 | instead. MSYS sh.exe also appears to cause various problems. If you have |
| 133 | MSYS installed, try "make SHELL=cmd.exe" to force the use of cmd.exe |
| 134 | instead of sh.exe. |
| 135 | |
| 136 | sh exists no sh |
| 137 | |
| 138 | cygwin b20.1 make (3.75): fails[1, 5] fails[2, 5] |
| 139 | MSVC compiled gmake 3.77: okay okay |
| 140 | MSVC compiled gmake 3.78.1: okay okay |
| 141 | MSVC compiled gmake 3.79.1: okay okay |
| 142 | mingw32/gcc-2.92.2 make (3.77): okay okay[4] |
| 143 | cygwin compiled gmake 3.77: fails[1, 5] fails[2, 5] |
| 144 | cygwin compiled make 3.78.1: fails[5] fails[2, 5] |
| 145 | cygwin compiled make 3.79.1: fails[3, 5] fails[2?, 5] |
| 146 | cygwin compiled make 3.80: fails?[6] fails?[6] |
| 147 | cygwin compiled make 3.81: fails fails?[6] |
| 148 | mingw32 compiled make 3.79.1: okay okay |
| 149 | mingw32 compiled make 3.80: okay okay[6] |
| 150 | mingw32 compiled make 3.81: okay okay[7] |
| 151 | |
| 152 | Notes: |
| 153 | |
| 154 | [1] doesn't cope with makefiles with DOS line endings, so must mount |
| 155 | emacs source with text!=binary. |
| 156 | [2] fails when needs to invoke shell commands; okay invoking gcc etc. |
| 157 | [3] requires LC_MESSAGES support to build; cannot build with early |
| 158 | versions of cygwin. |
| 159 | [4] may fail on Windows 9X and Windows ME; if so, install Bash. |
| 160 | [5] fails when building leim due to the use of cygwin style paths. |
| 161 | May work if building emacs without leim. |
| 162 | [6] not recommended; please report if you try this combination. |
| 163 | [7] tested only on Windows XP. |
| 164 | |
| 165 | Other compilers may work, but specific reports from people that have |
| 166 | tried suggest that the Intel C compiler (for example) may produce an |
| 167 | Emacs executable with strange filename completion behaviour. Unless |
| 168 | you would like to assist by finding and fixing the cause of any bugs |
| 169 | like this, we recommend the use of the supported compilers mentioned |
| 170 | in the previous paragraph. |
| 171 | |
| 172 | You will also need a copy of the Posix cp, rm and mv programs. These |
| 173 | and other useful Posix utilities can be obtained from one of several |
| 174 | projects: |
| 175 | |
| 176 | * http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/ ( GnuWin32 ) |
| 177 | * http://www.mingw.org/ ( MinGW ) |
| 178 | * http://www.cygwin.com/ ( Cygwin ) |
| 179 | * http://unxutils.sourceforge.net/ ( UnxUtils ) |
| 180 | |
| 181 | If you build Emacs on Windows 9X or ME, not on Windows 2K/XP or |
| 182 | Windows NT, we suggest to install the Cygwin port of Bash. That is |
| 183 | because the native Windows shell COMMAND.COM is too limited; the |
| 184 | Emacs build procedure tries very hard to support even such limited |
| 185 | shells, but as none of the Windows developers of Emacs work on |
| 186 | Windows 9x, we cannot guarantee that it works without a more |
| 187 | powerful shell. |
| 188 | |
| 189 | Additional instructions and help for building Emacs on Windows can be |
| 190 | found at the Emacs Wiki: |
| 191 | |
| 192 | http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/WThirtyTwoInstallationKit |
| 193 | |
| 194 | and at this URL: |
| 195 | |
| 196 | http://ourcomments.org/Emacs/w32-build-emacs.html |
| 197 | |
| 198 | * Configuring |
| 199 | |
| 200 | Configuration of Emacs is now handled by running configure.bat in the |
| 201 | `nt' subdirectory. It will detect which compiler you have available, |
| 202 | and generate makefiles accordingly. You can override the compiler |
| 203 | detection, and control optimization and debug settings, by specifying |
| 204 | options on the command line when invoking configure. |
| 205 | |
| 206 | To configure Emacs to build with GCC or MSVC, whichever is available, |
| 207 | simply change to the `nt' subdirectory and run `configure.bat' with no |
| 208 | options. To see what options are available, run `configure --help'. |
| 209 | |
| 210 | N.B. It is normal to see a few error messages output while configure |
| 211 | is running, when gcc support is being tested. These cannot be |
| 212 | surpressed because of limitations in the Windows 9x command.com shell. |
| 213 | |
| 214 | You are encouraged to look at the file config.log which shows details |
| 215 | for failed tests, after configure.bat finishes. Any unexplained failure |
| 216 | should be investigated and perhaps reported as a bug (see the section |
| 217 | about reporting bugs in the file README in this directory and in the |
| 218 | Emacs manual). |
| 219 | |
| 220 | * Optional image library support |
| 221 | |
| 222 | In addition to its "native" image formats (pbm and xbm), Emacs can |
| 223 | handle other image types: xpm, tiff, gif, png and jpeg (postscript is |
| 224 | currently unsupported on Windows). To build Emacs with support for |
| 225 | them, the corresponding headers must be in the include path when the |
| 226 | configure script is run. This can be setup using environment |
| 227 | variables, or by specifying --cflags -I... options on the command-line |
| 228 | to configure.bat. The configure script will report whether it was |
| 229 | able to detect the headers. If the results of this testing appear to be |
| 230 | incorrect, please look for details in the file config.log: it will show |
| 231 | the failed test programs and compiler error messages that should explain |
| 232 | what is wrong. (Usually, any such failures happen because some headers |
| 233 | are missing due to bad packaging of the image support libraries.) |
| 234 | |
| 235 | To use the external image support, the DLLs implementing the |
| 236 | functionality must be found when Emacs first needs them, either on the |
| 237 | PATH, or in the same directory as emacs.exe. Failure to find a |
| 238 | library is not an error; the associated image format will simply be |
| 239 | unavailable. Note that once Emacs has determined that a library can |
| 240 | not be found, there's no way to force it to try again, other than |
| 241 | restarting. See the variable `image-library-alist' to configure the |
| 242 | expected names of the libraries. |
| 243 | |
| 244 | Some image libraries have dependencies on one another, or on zlib. |
| 245 | For example, tiff support depends on the jpeg library. If you did not |
| 246 | compile the libraries yourself, you must make sure that any dependency |
| 247 | is in the PATH or otherwise accesible and that the binaries are |
| 248 | compatible (for example, that they were built with the same compiler). |
| 249 | |
| 250 | Binaries for the image libraries (among many others) can be found at |
| 251 | the GnuWin32 project. These are built with MinGW, but they can be |
| 252 | used with both GCC/MinGW and MSVC builds of Emacs. See the info on |
| 253 | http://ourcomments.org/Emacs/EmacsW32.html for more details about |
| 254 | installing image support libraries. |
| 255 | |
| 256 | * Building |
| 257 | |
| 258 | After running configure, simply run the appropriate `make' program for |
| 259 | your compiler to build Emacs. For MSVC, this is nmake; for GCC, it is |
| 260 | GNU make. (If you are building out of CVS, say "make bootstrap" or |
| 261 | "nmake bootstrap" instead.) |
| 262 | |
| 263 | As the files are compiled, you will see some warning messages |
| 264 | declaring that some functions don't return a value, or that some data |
| 265 | conversions will be lossy, etc. You can safely ignore these messages. |
| 266 | The warnings may be fixed in the main FSF source at some point, but |
| 267 | until then we will just live with them. |
| 268 | |
| 269 | With GNU Make, you can use the -j command-line option to have Make |
| 270 | execute several commands at once, like this: |
| 271 | |
| 272 | gmake -j 4 XMFLAGS="-j 3" |
| 273 | |
| 274 | The XMFLAGS variable overrides the default behavior of GNU Make on |
| 275 | Windows, whereby recursive Make invocations reset the maximum number |
| 276 | of simultaneous commands to 1. The above command allows up to 4 |
| 277 | simultaneous commands at once in the top-level Make, and up to 3 in |
| 278 | each one of the recursive Make's; you can use other numbers of jobs, |
| 279 | if you wish. |
| 280 | |
| 281 | If you are building from CVS, the following commands will produce |
| 282 | the Info manuals (which are not part of the CVS repository): |
| 283 | |
| 284 | make info |
| 285 | or |
| 286 | nmake info |
| 287 | |
| 288 | Note that you will need makeinfo.exe (from the GNU Texinfo package) |
| 289 | in order for this command to succeed. |
| 290 | |
| 291 | * Installing |
| 292 | |
| 293 | To install Emacs after it has compiled, simply run `nmake install' |
| 294 | or `make install', depending on which version of the Make utility |
| 295 | do you have. |
| 296 | |
| 297 | By default, Emacs will be installed in the location where it was |
| 298 | built, but a different location can be specified either using the |
| 299 | --prefix option to configure, or by setting INSTALL_DIR when running |
| 300 | make, like so: |
| 301 | |
| 302 | make install INSTALL_DIR=D:/emacs |
| 303 | |
| 304 | (for `nmake', type "nmake install INSTALL_DIR=D:/emacs" instead). |
| 305 | |
| 306 | The install process will run addpm to setup the registry entries, and |
| 307 | to create a Start menu icon for Emacs. |
| 308 | |
| 309 | * Trouble-shooting |
| 310 | |
| 311 | The main problems that are likely to be encountered when building |
| 312 | Emacs stem from using an old version of GCC, or old MinGW or W32 API |
| 313 | headers. Additionally, cygwin ports of GNU make may require the Emacs |
| 314 | source tree to be mounted with text!=binary, because the makefiles |
| 315 | generated by configure.bat necessarily use DOS line endings. Also, |
| 316 | cygwin ports of make must run in UNIX mode, either by specifying |
| 317 | --unix on the command line, or MAKE_MODE=UNIX in the environment. |
| 318 | |
| 319 | When configure runs, it attempts to detect when GCC itself, or the |
| 320 | headers it is using, are not suitable for building Emacs. GCC version |
| 321 | 2.95 or later is needed, because that is when the Windows port gained |
| 322 | sufficient support for anonymous structs and unions to cope with some |
| 323 | definitions from winnt.h that are used by addsection.c. The W32 API |
| 324 | headers that come with Cygwin b20.1 are incomplete, and do not include |
| 325 | some definitions required by addsection.c, for instance. Also, older |
| 326 | releases of the W32 API headers from Anders Norlander contain a typo |
| 327 | in the definition of IMAGE_FIRST_SECTION in winnt.h, which |
| 328 | addsection.c relies on. Versions of w32api-xxx.zip from at least |
| 329 | 1999-11-18 onwards are okay. |
| 330 | |
| 331 | When in doubt about correctness of what configure did, look at the file |
| 332 | config.log, which shows all the failed test programs and compiler |
| 333 | messages associated with the failures. If that doesn't give a clue, |
| 334 | please report the problems, together with the relevant fragments from |
| 335 | config.log, as bugs. |
| 336 | |
| 337 | If configure succeeds, but make fails, install the Cygwin port of |
| 338 | Bash, even if the table above indicates that Emacs should be able to |
| 339 | build without sh.exe. (Some versions of Windows shells are too dumb |
| 340 | for Makefile's used by Emacs.) |
| 341 | |
| 342 | If you are using certain Cygwin builds of GCC, such as Cygwin version |
| 343 | 1.1.8, you may need to specify some extra compiler flags like so: |
| 344 | |
| 345 | configure --with-gcc --cflags -mwin32 --cflags -D__MSVCRT__ |
| 346 | --ldflags -mwin32 |
| 347 | |
| 348 | However, the latest Cygwin versions, such as 1.3.3, don't need those |
| 349 | switches; you can simply use "configure --with-gcc". |
| 350 | |
| 351 | We will attempt to auto-detect the need for these flags in a future |
| 352 | release. |
| 353 | |
| 354 | * Debugging |
| 355 | |
| 356 | You should be able to debug Emacs using the debugger that is |
| 357 | appropriate for the compiler you used, namely DevStudio or Windbg if |
| 358 | compiled with MSVC, or GDB if compiled with GCC. |
| 359 | |
| 360 | When Emacs aborts due to a fatal internal error, Emacs on Windows |
| 361 | pops up an Emacs Abort Dialog asking you whether you want to debug |
| 362 | Emacs or terminate it. If Emacs was built with MSVC, click YES |
| 363 | twice, and Windbg or the DevStudio debugger will start up |
| 364 | automatically. If Emacs was built with GCC, first start GDB and |
| 365 | attach it to the Emacs process with the "gdb -p EMACS-PID" command, |
| 366 | where EMACS-PID is the Emacs process ID (which you can see in the |
| 367 | Windows Task Manager), type the "continue" command inside GDB, and |
| 368 | only then click YES on the abort dialog. This will pass control to |
| 369 | the debugger, and you will be able to debug the cause of the fatal |
| 370 | error. |
| 371 | |
| 372 | Emacs functions implemented in C use a naming convention that reflects |
| 373 | their names in lisp. The names of the C routines are the lisp names |
| 374 | prefixed with 'F', and with dashes converted to underscores. For |
| 375 | example, the function call-process is implemented in C by |
| 376 | Fcall_process. Similarly, lisp variables are prefixed with 'V', again |
| 377 | with dashes converted to underscores. These conventions enable you to |
| 378 | easily set breakpoints or examine familiar lisp variables by name. |
| 379 | |
| 380 | Since Emacs data is often in the form of a lisp object, and the |
| 381 | Lisp_Object type is difficult to examine manually in a debugger, |
| 382 | Emacs provides a helper routine called debug_print that prints out a |
| 383 | readable representation of a Lisp_Object. If you are using GDB, |
| 384 | there is a .gdbinit file in the src directory which provides |
| 385 | definitions that are useful for examining lisp objects. Therefore, |
| 386 | the following tips are mainly of interest when using MSVC. |
| 387 | |
| 388 | The output from debug_print is sent to stderr, and to the debugger |
| 389 | via the OutputDebugString routine. The output sent to stderr should |
| 390 | be displayed in the console window that was opened when the |
| 391 | emacs.exe executable was started. The output sent to the debugger |
| 392 | should be displayed in its "Debug" output window. |
| 393 | |
| 394 | When you are in the process of debugging Emacs and you would like to |
| 395 | examine the contents of a Lisp_Object variable, popup the QuickWatch |
| 396 | window (QuickWatch has an eyeglass symbol on its button in the |
| 397 | toolbar). In the text field at the top of the window, enter |
| 398 | debug_print(<variable>) and hit return. For example, start and run |
| 399 | Emacs in the debugger until it is waiting for user input. Then click |
| 400 | on the Break button in the debugger to halt execution. Emacs should |
| 401 | halt in ZwUserGetMessage waiting for an input event. Use the Call |
| 402 | Stack window to select the procedure w32_msp_pump up the call stack |
| 403 | (see below for why you have to do this). Open the QuickWatch window |
| 404 | and enter debug_print(Vexec_path). Evaluating this expression will |
| 405 | then print out the contents of the lisp variable exec-path. |
| 406 | |
| 407 | If QuickWatch reports that the symbol is unknown, then check the call |
| 408 | stack in the Call Stack window. If the selected frame in the call |
| 409 | stack is not an Emacs procedure, then the debugger won't recognize |
| 410 | Emacs symbols. Instead, select a frame that is inside an Emacs |
| 411 | procedure and try using debug_print again. |
| 412 | |
| 413 | If QuickWatch invokes debug_print but nothing happens, then check the |
| 414 | thread that is selected in the debugger. If the selected thread is |
| 415 | not the last thread to run (the "current" thread), then it cannot be |
| 416 | used to execute debug_print. Use the Debug menu to select the current |
| 417 | thread and try using debug_print again. Note that the debugger halts |
| 418 | execution (e.g., due to a breakpoint) in the context of the current |
| 419 | thread, so this should only be a problem if you've explicitly switched |
| 420 | threads. |
| 421 | |
| 422 | COPYING PERMISSIONS |
| 423 | |
| 424 | Permission is granted to anyone to make or distribute verbatim copies |
| 425 | of this document as received, in any medium, provided that the |
| 426 | copyright notice and permission notice are preserved, |
| 427 | and that the distributor grants the recipient permission |
| 428 | for further redistribution as permitted by this notice. |
| 429 | |
| 430 | Permission is granted to distribute modified versions |
| 431 | of this document, or of portions of it, |
| 432 | under the above conditions, provided also that they |
| 433 | carry prominent notices stating who last changed them, |
| 434 | and that any new or changed statements about the activities |
| 435 | of the Free Software Foundation are approved by the Foundation. |