(describe-key-briefly): Compute interactive args

[emacs.git] / nt / INSTALL

                      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.

  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.

  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).

  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]

  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://www.mingw.org/                         ( MinGW    )
  * http://www.cygwin.com/                        ( Cygwin   )
  * http://unxutils.sourceforge.net/              ( UnxUtils )
  * http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/              ( GnuWin32 )

  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.

  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' 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.

  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.

* 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(<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.

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.