| Port of GNU make to Windows NT and Windows 95 |
| Builds natively with MSVC 2.x or MSVC 4.x compilers. |
| Should also build fine with MSVC 5.x and 6.x (though not confirmed). |
| |
| This Windows 32-bit port of GNU make is maintained primarily by Rob |
| Tulloh, who is also the author of this README. |
| |
| To build with nmake on Windows NT, Windows 95, or Windows 98: |
| |
| 1. Make sure cl.exe is in your %Path%. Example: |
| |
| set Path=%Path%;c:/msdev/bin |
| |
| 2. Make sure %include% is set to msvc include directory. Example: |
| |
| set include=c:/msdev/include |
| |
| 3. Make sure %lib% is set to msvc lib directory. Example: |
| |
| set lib=c:/msdev/lib |
| |
| 4. nmake /f NMakefile |
| |
| |
| A short cut to steps 1, 2, and 3 is to run VCVARS32.bat before |
| invoking namke. For example: |
| |
| c: |
| cd \msdev\bin |
| VCVARS32.bat |
| cd \path\to\make-%VERSION% |
| nmake /f NMakefile |
| |
| There is a bat file (build_w32.bat) for folks who have fear of nmake. |
| |
| Outputs: |
| |
| WinDebug/make.exe |
| WinRel/make.exe |
| |
| |
| -- Notes/Caveats -- |
| |
| GNU make on Windows 32-bit platforms: |
| |
| This version of make is ported natively to Windows32 platforms |
| (Windows NT 3.51, Windows NT 4.0, Windows 95, and Windows 98). It |
| does not rely on any 3rd party software or add-on packages for |
| building. The only thing needed is a version of Visual C++, |
| which is the predominant compiler used on Windows32 platforms. |
| |
| Do not confuse this port of GNU make with other Windows32 projects |
| which provide a GNU make binary. These are separate projects |
| and are not connected to this port effort. |
| |
| GNU make and sh.exe: |
| |
| This port prefers you have a working sh.exe somewhere on your |
| system. If you don't have sh.exe, the port falls back to |
| MSDOS mode for launching programs (via a batch file). |
| The MSDOS mode style execution has not been tested that |
| carefully though (The author uses GNU bash as sh.exe). |
| |
| There are very few true ports of Bourne shell for NT right now. |
| There is a version of GNU bash available from Cygnus "Cygwin" |
| porting effort (http://sourceware.cygnus.com/cygwin). |
| Other possibilities are the MKS version of sh.exe, or building |
| your own with a package like NutCracker (DataFocus) or Portage |
| (Consensys). |
| |
| GNU make and brain-dead shells (BATCH_MODE_ONLY_SHELL): |
| |
| Some versions of Bourne shell does not behave well when invoked |
| as 'sh -c' from CreateProcess(). The main problem is they seem |
| to have a hard time handling quoted strings correctly. This can |
| be circumvented by writing commands to be executed to a batch |
| file and then executing the command by calling 'sh file'. |
| |
| To work around this difficulty, this version of make supports |
| a batch mode. When BATCH_MODE_ONLY_SHELL is defined at compile |
| time, make forces all command lines to be executed via script |
| files instead of by command line. |
| |
| A native Windows32 system with no Bourne shell will also run |
| in batch mode. All command lines will be put into batch files |
| and executed via $(COMSPEC) (%COMSPEC%). |
| |
| GNU make and Cygnus GNU Windows32 tools: |
| |
| Good news! Make now has native support for Cygwin sh. To enable, |
| define the HAVE_CYGWIN_SHELL in config.h and rebuild make |
| from scratch. This version of make tested with B20.1 of Cygwin. |
| Do not define BATCH_MODE_ONLY_SHELL if you use HAVE_CYGWIN_SHELL. |
| |
| GNU make and the MKS shell: |
| |
| There is now semi-official support for the MKS shell. To turn this |
| support on, define HAVE_MKS_SHELL in the config.h.W32 before you |
| build make. Do not define BATCH_MODE_ONLY_SHELL if you turn |
| on HAVE_MKS_SHELL. |
| |
| GNU make handling of drive letters in pathnames (PATH, vpath, VPATH): |
| |
| There is a caveat that should be noted with respect to handling |
| single character pathnames on Windows systems. When colon is |
| used in PATH variables, make tries to be smart about knowing when |
| you are using colon as a separator versus colon as a drive |
| letter. Unfortunately, something as simple as the string 'x:/' |
| could be interpreted 2 ways: (x and /) or (x:/). |
| |
| Make chooses to interpret a letter plus colon (e.g. x:/) as a |
| drive letter pathname. If it is necessary to use single |
| character directories in paths (VPATH, vpath, Path, PATH), the |
| user must do one of two things: |
| |
| a. Use semicolon as the separator to disambiguate colon. For |
| example use 'x;/' if you want to say 'x' and '/' are |
| separate components. |
| |
| b. Qualify the directory name so that there is more than |
| one character in the path(s) used. For example, none |
| of these settings are ambiguous: |
| |
| ./x:./y |
| /some/path/x:/some/path/y |
| x:/some/path/x:x:/some/path/y |
| |
| Please note that you are free to mix colon and semi-colon in the |
| specification of paths. Make is able to figure out the intended |
| result and convert the paths internally to the format needed |
| when interacting with the operating system. |
| |
| You are encouraged to use colon as the separator character. |
| This should ease the pain of deciding how to handle various path |
| problems which exist between platforms. If colon is used on |
| both Unix and Windows systems, then no ifdef'ing will be |
| necessary in the makefile source. |
| |
| GNU make test suite: |
| |
| I verified all functionality with a slightly modified version |
| of make-test-%VERSION% (modifications to get test suite to run |
| on Windows NT). All tests pass in an environment that includes |
| sh.exe. Tests were performed on both Windows NT and Windows 95. |
| |
| Building GNU make on Windows NT and Windows 95/98 with Microsoft Visual C: |
| |
| I did not provide a Visual C project file with this port as |
| the project file would not be considered freely distributable |
| (or so I think). It is easy enough to create one, though, if |
| you know how to use Visual C. |
| |
| I build the program statically to avoid problems locating DLL's |
| on machines that may not have MSVC runtime installed. If you |
| prefer, you can change make to build with shared libraries by |
| changing /MT to /MD in the NMakefile (or in build_w32.bat). |
| |
| The program has not been built for non-Intel architectures (yet). |
| |
| I have not tried to build with any other compilers than MSVC. I |
| have heard that this is possible though so don't be afraid to |
| notify me of your successes! |
| |
| Pathnames and white space: |
| |
| Unlike Unix, Windows 95/NT systems encourage pathnames which |
| contain white space (e.g. C:\Program Files\). These sorts of pathnames |
| are legal under Unix too, but are never encouraged. There is |
| at least one place in make (VPATH/vpath handling) where paths |
| containing white space will simply not work. There may be others |
| too. I chose to not try and port make in such a way so that |
| these sorts of paths could be handled. I offer these suggestions |
| as workarounds: |
| |
| 1. Use 8.3 notation |
| 2. Rename the directory so it does not contain white space. |
| |
| If you are unhappy with this choice, this is free software |
| and you are free to take a crack at making this work. The code |
| in w32/pathstuff.c and vpath.c would be the places to start. |
| |
| Pathnames and Case insensitivity: |
| |
| Unlike Unix, Windows 95/NT systems are case insensitive but case |
| preserving. For example if you tell the file system to create a |
| file named "Target", it will preserve the case. Subsequent access to |
| the file with other case permutations will succeed (i.e. opening a |
| file named "target" or "TARGET" will open the file "Target"). |
| |
| By default, GNU make retains its case sensitivity when comparing |
| target names and existing files or directories. It can be |
| configured, however, into a case preserving and case insensitive |
| mode by adding a define for HAVE_CASE_INSENSITIVE_FS to |
| config.h.W32. |
| |
| For example, the following makefile will create a file named |
| Target in the directory subdir which will subsequently be used |
| to satisfy the dependency of SUBDIR/DepTarget on SubDir/TARGET. |
| Without HAVE_CASE_INSENSITIVE_FS configured, the dependency link |
| will not be made: |
| |
| subdir/Target: |
| touch $@ |
| |
| SUBDIR/DepTarget: SubDir/TARGET |
| cp $^ $@ |
| |
| Reliance on this behavior also eliminates the ability of GNU make |
| to use case in comparison of matching rules. For example, it is |
| not possible to set up a C++ rule using %.C that is different |
| than a C rule using %.c. GNU make will consider these to be the |
| same rule and will issue a warning. |
| |
| SAMBA/NTFS/VFAT: |
| |
| I have not had any success building the debug version of this |
| package using SAMBA as my file server. The reason seems to be |
| related to the way VC++ 4.0 changes the case name of the pdb |
| filename it is passed on the command line. It seems to change |
| the name always to to lower case. I contend that |
| the VC++ compiler should not change the casename of files that |
| are passed as arguments on the command line. I don't think this |
| was a problem in MSVC 2.x, but I know it is a problem in MSVC 4.x. |
| |
| The package builds fine on VFAT and NTFS filesystems. |
| |
| Most all of the development I have done to date has been using |
| NTFS and long file names. I have not done any considerable work |
| under VFAT. VFAT users may wish to be aware that this port |
| of make does respect case sensitivity. |
| |
| FAT: |
| |
| Version 3.76 added support for FAT filesystems. Make |
| works around some difficulties with stat'ing of |
| files and caching of filenames and directories internally. |
| |
| Bug reports: |
| |
| Please submit bugs via the normal bug reporting mechanism which |
| is described in the GNU make manual and the base README. |