Building and Installing Emacs on Windows NT/2K/XP and Windows 95/98/ME Copyright (C) 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006 Free Software Foundation, Inc. See the end of the file for copying permissions. * For the impatient Here are the concise instructions for configuring and building the native Win32 binary of Emacs on Windows, for those who want to skip the complex explanations and ``just do it'': 1. Change to the `nt' directory (the directory of this file): cd nt 2. Run configure.bat. From the COMMAND.COM/CMD.EXE command prompt: configure from a Unixy shell prompt: cmd /c configure.bat or command.com /c configure.bat 3. Run the Make utility suitable for your environment. If you build with the Microsoft's Visual C compiler: nmake For the development environments based on GNU GCC (MinGW, MSYS, Cygwin), depending on how Make is called, it could be: make or gnumake or gmake (If you are building from CVS, say "make bootstrap" or "nmake bootstrap" instead.) 4. Generate the Info manuals (only if you are building out of CVS): make info (change "make" to "nmake" if you use MSVC). 5. Install the produced binaries: make install That's it! If these short instructions somehow fail, read the rest of this file. * Preliminaries If you used WinZip to unpack the distribution, we suggest to remove the files and unpack again with a different program! WinZip is known to create some subtle and hard to debug problems, such as converting files to DOS CR-LF format, not creating empty directories, etc. We suggest to use djtarnt.exe from the GNU FTP site. If you are building out of CVS, then some files in this directory (.bat files, nmake.defs and makefile.w32-in) may need the line-ends fixing first. The easiest way to do this and avoid future conflicts is to run the following command in this (emacs/nt) directory: cvs update -kb Alternatively, use programs that convert end-of-line format, such as dos2unix and unix2dos available from GnuWin32 or dtou and utod from the DJGPP project. In addition to this file, you should also read INSTALL.CVS in the parent directory, and make sure that you have a version of "touch.exe" in your path, and that it will create files that do not yet exist. * Supported development environments To compile Emacs, you will need either Microsoft Visual C++ 2.0 or later and nmake, or a Windows port of GCC 2.95 or later with MinGW and W32 API support and a port of GNU Make. You can use the Cygwin ports of GCC, but Emacs requires the MinGW headers and libraries to build (latest versions of the Cygwin toolkit, at least since v1.3.3, include the MinGW headers and libraries as an integral part). The rest of this file assumes you have a working development environment. If you just installed such an environment, try building a trivial C "Hello world" program, and see if it works. If it doesn't work, resolve that problem first! If you use the MinGW port of GCC and GNU Make to build Emacs, there are some compatibility issues wrt Make and the shell that is run by Make, either the standard COMMAND.COM/CMD.EXE supplied with Windows or sh.exe., a port of a Unixy shell. For reference, here is a list of which builds of GNU Make are known to work or not, and whether they work in the presence and/or absence of sh.exe, the Cygwin port of Bash. Note that any version of Make that is compiled with Cygwin will only work with Cygwin tools, due to the use of cygwin style paths. This means Cygwin Make is unsuitable for building parts of Emacs that need to invoke Emacs itself (leim and "make bootstrap", for example). Also see the Trouble-shooting section below if you decide to go ahead and use Cygwin make. In addition, using 4NT as your shell is known to fail the build process, at least for 4NT version 3.01. Use CMD.EXE, the default Windows shell, instead. MSYS sh.exe also appears to cause various problems. If you have MSYS installed, try "make SHELL=cmd.exe" to force the use of cmd.exe instead of sh.exe. sh exists no sh cygwin b20.1 make (3.75): fails[1, 5] fails[2, 5] MSVC compiled gmake 3.77: okay okay MSVC compiled gmake 3.78.1: okay okay MSVC compiled gmake 3.79.1: okay okay mingw32/gcc-2.92.2 make (3.77): okay okay[4] cygwin compiled gmake 3.77: fails[1, 5] fails[2, 5] cygwin compiled make 3.78.1: fails[5] fails[2, 5] cygwin compiled make 3.79.1: fails[3, 5] fails[2?, 5] mingw32 compiled make 3.79.1: okay okay mingw32 compiled make 3.80: okay unknown[6] mingw32 compiled make 3.81: okay okay[7] Notes: [1] doesn't cope with makefiles with DOS line endings, so must mount emacs source with text!=binary. [2] fails when needs to invoke shell commands; okay invoking gcc etc. [3] requires LC_MESSAGES support to build; cannot build with early versions of cygwin. [4] may fail on Windows 9X and Windows ME; if so, install Bash. [5] fails when building leim due to the use of cygwin style paths. May work if building emacs without leim. [6] please report if you try this combination. Other compilers may work, but specific reports from people that have tried suggest that the Intel C compiler (for example) may produce an Emacs executable with strange filename completion behaviour. Unless you would like to assist by finding and fixing the cause of any bugs like this, we recommend the use of the supported compilers mentioned in the previous paragraph. You will also need a copy of the Posix cp, rm and mv programs. These and other useful Posix utilities can be obtained from one of several projects: * http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/ ( GnuWin32 ) * http://www.mingw.org/ ( MinGW ) * http://www.cygwin.com/ ( Cygwin ) * http://unxutils.sourceforge.net/ ( UnxUtils ) If you build Emacs on Windows 9X or ME, not on Windows 2K/XP or Windows NT, we suggest to install the Cygwin port of Bash. That is because the native Windows shell COMMAND.COM is too limited; the Emacs build procedure tries very hard to support even such limited shells, but as none of the Windows developers of Emacs work on Windows 9x, we cannot guarantee that it works without a more powerful shell. Additional instructions and help for building Emacs on Windows can be found at the Emacs Wiki: http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/WThirtyTwoInstallationKit and at this URL: http://ourcomments.org/Emacs/w32-build-emacs.html * Configuring Configuration of Emacs is now handled by running configure.bat in the `nt' subdirectory. It will detect which compiler you have available, and generate makefiles accordingly. You can override the compiler detection, and control optimization and debug settings, by specifying options on the command line when invoking configure. To configure Emacs to build with GCC or MSVC, whichever is available, simply change to the `nt' subdirectory and run `configure.bat' with no options. To see what options are available, run `configure --help'. N.B. It is normal to see a few error messages output while configure is running, when gcc support is being tested. These cannot be surpressed because of limitations in the Windows 9x command.com shell. You are encouraged to look at the file config.log which shows details for failed tests, after configure.bat finishes. Any unexplained failure should be investigated and perhaps reported as a bug (see the section about reporting bugs in the file README in this directory and in the Emacs manual). * Optional image library support In addition to its "native" image formats (pbm and xbm), Emacs can handle other image types: xpm, tiff, gif, png and jpeg (postscript is currently unsupported on Windows). To build Emacs with support for them, the corresponding headers must be in the include path when the configure script is run. This can be setup using environment variables, or by specifying --cflags -I... options on the command-line to configure.bat. The configure script will report whether it was able to detect the headers. If the results of this testing appear to be incorrect, please look for details in the file config.log: it will show the failed test programs and compiler error messages that should explain what is wrong. (Usually, any such failures happen because some headers are missing due to bad packaging of the image support libraries.) To use the external image support, the DLLs implementing the functionality must be found when Emacs first needs them, either on the PATH, or in the same directory as emacs.exe. Failure to find a library is not an error; the associated image format will simply be unavailable. Note that once Emacs has determined that a library can not be found, there's no way to force it to try again, other than restarting. See the variable `image-library-alist' to configure the expected names of the libraries. Some image libraries have dependencies on one another, or on zlib. For example, tiff support depends on the jpeg library. If you did not compile the libraries yourself, you must make sure that any dependency is in the PATH or otherwise accesible and that the binaries are compatible (for example, that they were built with the same compiler). Binaries for the image libraries (among many others) can be found at the GnuWin32 project. These are built with MinGW, but they can be used with both GCC/MinGW and MSVC builds of Emacs. See the info on http://ourcomments.org/Emacs/EmacsW32.html for more details about installing image support libraries. * Building After running configure, simply run the appropriate `make' program for your compiler to build Emacs. For MSVC, this is nmake; for GCC, it is GNU make. (If you are building out of CVS, say "make bootstrap" or "nmake bootstrap" instead.) As the files are compiled, you will see some warning messages declaring that some functions don't return a value, or that some data conversions will be lossy, etc. You can safely ignore these messages. The warnings may be fixed in the main FSF source at some point, but until then we will just live with them. If you are building from CVS, the following commands will produce the Info manuals (which are not part of the CVS repository): make info or nmake info * Installing To install Emacs after it has compiled, simply run `nmake install' or `make install', depending on which version of the Make utility do you have. By default, Emacs will be installed in the location where it was built, but a different location can be specified either using the --prefix option to configure, or by setting INSTALL_DIR when running make, like so: make install INSTALL_DIR=D:/emacs (for `nmake', type "nmake install INSTALL_DIR=D:/emacs" instead). The install process will run addpm to setup the registry entries, and to create a Start menu icon for Emacs. * Trouble-shooting The main problems that are likely to be encountered when building Emacs stem from using an old version of GCC, or old MinGW or W32 API headers. Additionally, cygwin ports of GNU make may require the Emacs source tree to be mounted with text!=binary, because the makefiles generated by configure.bat necessarily use DOS line endings. Also, cygwin ports of make must run in UNIX mode, either by specifying --unix on the command line, or MAKE_MODE=UNIX in the environment. When configure runs, it attempts to detect when GCC itself, or the headers it is using, are not suitable for building Emacs. GCC version 2.95 or later is needed, because that is when the Windows port gained sufficient support for anonymous structs and unions to cope with some definitions from winnt.h that are used by addsection.c. The W32 API headers that come with Cygwin b20.1 are incomplete, and do not include some definitions required by addsection.c, for instance. Also, older releases of the W32 API headers from Anders Norlander contain a typo in the definition of IMAGE_FIRST_SECTION in winnt.h, which addsection.c relies on. Versions of w32api-xxx.zip from at least 1999-11-18 onwards are okay. When in doubt about correctness of what configure did, look at the file config.log, which shows all the failed test programs and compiler messages associated with the failures. If that doesn't give a clue, please report the problems, together with the relevant fragments from config.log, as bugs. If configure succeeds, but make fails, install the Cygwin port of Bash, even if the table above indicates that Emacs should be able to build without sh.exe. (Some versions of Windows shells are too dumb for Makefile's used by Emacs.) If you are using certain Cygwin builds of GCC, such as Cygwin version 1.1.8, you may need to specify some extra compiler flags like so: configure --with-gcc --cflags -mwin32 --cflags -D__MSVCRT__ --ldflags -mwin32 However, the latest Cygwin versions, such as 1.3.3, don't need those switches; you can simply use "configure --with-gcc". We will attempt to auto-detect the need for these flags in a future release. * Debugging You should be able to debug Emacs using the debugger that is appropriate for the compiler you used, namely DevStudio or Windbg if compiled with MSVC, or GDB if compiled with GCC. When Emacs aborts due to a fatal internal error, Emacs on Windows pops up an Emacs Abort Dialog asking you whether you want to debug Emacs or terminate it. If Emacs was built with MSVC, click YES twice, and Windbg or the DevStudio debugger will start up automatically. If Emacs was built with GCC, first start GDB and attach it to the Emacs process with the "gdb -p EMACS-PID" command, where EMACS-PID is the Emacs process ID (which you can see in the Windows Task Manager), type the "continue" command inside GDB, and only then click YES on the abort dialog. This will pass control to the debugger, and you will be able to debug the cause of the fatal error. Emacs functions implemented in C use a naming convention that reflects their names in lisp. The names of the C routines are the lisp names prefixed with 'F', and with dashes converted to underscores. For example, the function call-process is implemented in C by Fcall_process. Similarly, lisp variables are prefixed with 'V', again with dashes converted to underscores. These conventions enable you to easily set breakpoints or examine familiar lisp variables by name. Since Emacs data is often in the form of a lisp object, and the Lisp_Object type is difficult to examine manually in a debugger, Emacs provides a helper routine called debug_print that prints out a readable representation of a Lisp_Object. If you are using GDB, there is a .gdbinit file in the src directory which provides definitions that are useful for examining lisp objects. Therefore, the following tips are mainly of interest when using MSVC. The output from debug_print is sent to stderr, and to the debugger via the OutputDebugString routine. The output sent to stderr should be displayed in the console window that was opened when the emacs.exe executable was started. The output sent to the debugger should be displayed in its "Debug" output window. When you are in the process of debugging Emacs and you would like to examine the contents of a Lisp_Object variable, popup the QuickWatch window (QuickWatch has an eyeglass symbol on its button in the toolbar). In the text field at the top of the window, enter debug_print() and hit return. For example, start and run Emacs in the debugger until it is waiting for user input. Then click on the Break button in the debugger to halt execution. Emacs should halt in ZwUserGetMessage waiting for an input event. Use the Call Stack window to select the procedure w32_msp_pump up the call stack (see below for why you have to do this). Open the QuickWatch window and enter debug_print(Vexec_path). Evaluating this expression will then print out the contents of the lisp variable exec-path. If QuickWatch reports that the symbol is unknown, then check the call stack in the Call Stack window. If the selected frame in the call stack is not an Emacs procedure, then the debugger won't recognize Emacs symbols. Instead, select a frame that is inside an Emacs procedure and try using debug_print again. If QuickWatch invokes debug_print but nothing happens, then check the thread that is selected in the debugger. If the selected thread is not the last thread to run (the "current" thread), then it cannot be used to execute debug_print. Use the Debug menu to select the current thread and try using debug_print again. Note that the debugger halts execution (e.g., due to a breakpoint) in the context of the current thread, so this should only be a problem if you've explicitly switched threads. COPYING PERMISSIONS Permission is granted to anyone to make or distribute verbatim copies of this document as received, in any medium, provided that the copyright notice and permission notice are preserved, and that the distributor grants the recipient permission for further redistribution as permitted by this notice. Permission is granted to distribute modified versions of this document, or of portions of it, under the above conditions, provided also that they carry prominent notices stating who last changed them, and that any new or changed statements about the activities of the Free Software Foundation are approved by the Foundation.