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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
422COPYING 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.