Building and Installing Emacs
on Windows NT/2K/XP and Windows 95/98/ME
Copyright (C) 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007
Free Software Foundation, Inc.
See the end of the file for license conditions.
* For the impatient
Here are the concise instructions for configuring and building the
native Windows binary of Emacs, for those who want to skip the
complex explanations and ``just do it'':
Do not use this recipe with Cygwin. For building on Cygwin,
use the normal installation instructions, ../INSTALL.
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 (but see notes about using
VC++ 8.0 and later below):
nmake
For the development environments based on GNU GCC (MinGW, MSYS,
Cygwin - but see notes about Cygwin make below), depending on how
Make is called, it could be:
make
or
mingw32-make
or
gnumake
or
gmake
(If you are building from CVS, say "make bootstrap" or "nmake
bootstrap" instead, and avoid using Cygwin make.)
With GNU Make, you can use the -j command-line option to have
Make execute several commands at once, like this:
gmake -j 2 XMFLAGS="-j 2"
The XMFLAGS variable overrides the default behavior of GNU Make
on Windows, whereby recursive Make invocations reset the maximum
number of simultaneous commands to 1. The above command allows
up to 4 simultaneous commands at once in the top-level Make, and
up to 3 in each one of the recursive Make's.
4. Generate the Info manuals (only if you are building out of CVS, and
if you have makeinfo.exe installed):
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 want to build a Cygwin port of Emacs, use the instructions in
the INSTALL file in the main Emacs directory (the parent of this
directory). These instructions are for building a native Windows
binary of Emacs.
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 up to 7.0, 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).
Note that building Emacs with Visual Studio 2005 (VC++ 8.0) is not
supported at this time, due to changes introduced by Microsoft into
the libraries shipped with the compiler.
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 Microsoft
Visual Studio .NET 2003, don't forget to run the VCVARS32.BAT batch
file from the `Bin' subdirectory of the directory where you have
installed VS.NET.
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, below 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]
cygwin compiled make 3.80: okay[6] fails?[7]
cygwin compiled make 3.81: fails fails?[7]
mingw32 compiled make 3.79.1: okay okay
mingw32 compiled make 3.80: okay okay[7]
mingw32 compiled make 3.81: okay okay[8]
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] need to uncomment 3 lines in nt/gmake.defs that invoke `cygpath'
(look for "cygpath" near line 85 of gmake.defs).
[7] not recommended; please report if you try this combination.
[8] tested only on Windows XP.
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 on these URLs:
http://ourcomments.org/Emacs/w32-build-emacs.html
http://derekslager.com/blog/posts/2007/01/emacs-hack-3-compile-emacs-from-cvs-on-windows.ashx
The second URL above includes instructions for building with MSVC,
as well as with MinGW, while the first URL covers only MinGW, but
has more details about it.
* 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'.
Do NOT use the --no-debug option to configure.bat unless you are
absolutely sure the produced binaries will never need to be run under
a debugger.
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/w32-build-emacs.html, under "How to Get
Images Support", for more details about installing image support
libraries. Note specifically that, due to some packaging snafus in
the GnuWin32-supplied image libraries, you will need to download
_source_ packages for some of the libraries in order to get the
header files necessary for building Emacs with image support.
* 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.
With GNU Make, you can use the -j command-line option to have Make
execute several commands at once, like this:
gmake -j 4 XMFLAGS="-j 3"
The XMFLAGS variable overrides the default behavior of GNU Make on
Windows, whereby recursive Make invocations reset the maximum number
of simultaneous commands to 1. The above command allows up to 4
simultaneous commands at once in the top-level Make, and up to 3 in
each one of the recursive Make's; you can use other numbers of jobs,
if you wish.
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
Note that you will need makeinfo.exe (from the GNU Texinfo package)
in order for this command to succeed.
* 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. (GDB for Windows
is available from the MinGW site, http://www.mingw.org/download.shtml.)
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(<variable>) 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.
This file is part of GNU Emacs.
GNU Emacs is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation; either version 2, or (at your option)
any later version.
GNU Emacs is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
GNU General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with GNU Emacs; see the file COPYING. If not, write to the
Free Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor,
Boston, MA 02110-1301, USA.