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