* xterm.c (x_display_ok): Fix minor bug and compilation warnings.
[bpt/emacs.git] / nt / INSTALL
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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,
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
311COPYING 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.