1 Port of GNU make to Windows NT and Windows 95
2 Builds natively with MSVC 2.x or MSVC 4.x compilers.
3 Should also build fine with MSVC 5.x and 6.x (though not confirmed).
5 This Windows 32-bit port of GNU make is maintained primarily by Rob
6 Tulloh, who is also the author of this README.
8 To build with nmake on Windows NT, Windows 95, or Windows 98:
10 1. Make sure cl.exe is in your %Path%. Example:
12 set Path=%Path%;c:/msdev/bin
14 2. Make sure %include% is set to msvc include directory. Example:
16 set include=c:/msdev/include
18 3. Make sure %lib% is set to msvc lib directory. Example:
25 A short cut to steps 1, 2, and 3 is to run VCVARS32.bat before
26 invoking namke. For example:
31 cd \path\to\make-%VERSION%
34 There is a bat file (build_w32.bat) for folks who have fear of nmake.
44 GNU make on Windows 32-bit platforms:
46 This version of make is ported natively to Windows32 platforms
47 (Windows NT 3.51, Windows NT 4.0, Windows 95, and Windows 98). It
48 does not rely on any 3rd party software or add-on packages for
49 building. The only thing needed is a version of Visual C++,
50 which is the predominant compiler used on Windows32 platforms.
52 Do not confuse this port of GNU make with other Windows32 projects
53 which provide a GNU make binary. These are separate projects
54 and are not connected to this port effort.
58 This port prefers you have a working sh.exe somewhere on your
59 system. If you don't have sh.exe, the port falls back to
60 MSDOS mode for launching programs (via a batch file).
61 The MSDOS mode style execution has not been tested that
62 carefully though (The author uses GNU bash as sh.exe).
64 There are very few true ports of Bourne shell for NT right now.
65 There is a version of GNU bash available from Cygnus "Cygwin"
66 porting effort (http://sourceware.cygnus.com/cygwin).
67 Other possibilities are the MKS version of sh.exe, or building
68 your own with a package like NutCracker (DataFocus) or Portage
71 GNU make and brain-dead shells (BATCH_MODE_ONLY_SHELL):
73 Some versions of Bourne shell do not behave well when invoked
74 as 'sh -c' from CreateProcess(). The main problem is they seem
75 to have a hard time handling quoted strings correctly. This can
76 be circumvented by writing commands to be executed to a batch
77 file and then executing the command by calling 'sh file'.
79 To work around this difficulty, this version of make supports
80 a batch mode. When BATCH_MODE_ONLY_SHELL is defined at compile
81 time, make forces all command lines to be executed via script
82 files instead of by command line. In this mode you must have a
83 working sh.exe in order to use parallel builds (-j).
85 A native Windows32 system with no Bourne shell will also run
86 in batch mode. All command lines will be put into batch files
87 and executed via $(COMSPEC) (%COMSPEC%). Note that parallel
88 builds (-j) require a working Bourne shell; they will not work
91 GNU make and Cygnus GNU Windows32 tools:
93 Good news! Make now has native support for Cygwin sh. To enable,
94 define the HAVE_CYGWIN_SHELL in config.h and rebuild make
95 from scratch. This version of make tested with B20.1 of Cygwin.
96 Do not define BATCH_MODE_ONLY_SHELL if you use HAVE_CYGWIN_SHELL.
98 GNU make and the MKS shell:
100 There is now semi-official support for the MKS shell. To turn this
101 support on, define HAVE_MKS_SHELL in the config.h.W32 before you
102 build make. Do not define BATCH_MODE_ONLY_SHELL if you turn
105 GNU make handling of drive letters in pathnames (PATH, vpath, VPATH):
107 There is a caveat that should be noted with respect to handling
108 single character pathnames on Windows systems. When colon is
109 used in PATH variables, make tries to be smart about knowing when
110 you are using colon as a separator versus colon as a drive
111 letter. Unfortunately, something as simple as the string 'x:/'
112 could be interpreted 2 ways: (x and /) or (x:/).
114 Make chooses to interpret a letter plus colon (e.g. x:/) as a
115 drive letter pathname. If it is necessary to use single
116 character directories in paths (VPATH, vpath, Path, PATH), the
117 user must do one of two things:
119 a. Use semicolon as the separator to disambiguate colon. For
120 example use 'x;/' if you want to say 'x' and '/' are
123 b. Qualify the directory name so that there is more than
124 one character in the path(s) used. For example, none
125 of these settings are ambiguous:
128 /some/path/x:/some/path/y
129 x:/some/path/x:x:/some/path/y
131 Please note that you are free to mix colon and semi-colon in the
132 specification of paths. Make is able to figure out the intended
133 result and convert the paths internally to the format needed
134 when interacting with the operating system.
136 You are encouraged to use colon as the separator character.
137 This should ease the pain of deciding how to handle various path
138 problems which exist between platforms. If colon is used on
139 both Unix and Windows systems, then no ifdef'ing will be
140 necessary in the makefile source.
144 I verified all functionality with a slightly modified version
145 of make-test-%VERSION% (modifications to get test suite to run
146 on Windows NT). All tests pass in an environment that includes
147 sh.exe. Tests were performed on both Windows NT and Windows 95.
149 Building GNU make on Windows NT and Windows 95/98 with Microsoft Visual C:
151 I did not provide a Visual C project file with this port as
152 the project file would not be considered freely distributable
153 (or so I think). It is easy enough to create one, though, if
154 you know how to use Visual C.
156 I build the program statically to avoid problems locating DLL's
157 on machines that may not have MSVC runtime installed. If you
158 prefer, you can change make to build with shared libraries by
159 changing /MT to /MD in the NMakefile (or in build_w32.bat).
161 The program has not been built for non-Intel architectures (yet).
163 I have not tried to build with any other compilers than MSVC. I
164 have heard that this is possible though so don't be afraid to
165 notify me of your successes!
167 Pathnames and white space:
169 Unlike Unix, Windows 95/NT systems encourage pathnames which
170 contain white space (e.g. C:\Program Files\). These sorts of pathnames
171 are legal under Unix too, but are never encouraged. There is
172 at least one place in make (VPATH/vpath handling) where paths
173 containing white space will simply not work. There may be others
174 too. I chose to not try and port make in such a way so that
175 these sorts of paths could be handled. I offer these suggestions
179 2. Rename the directory so it does not contain white space.
181 If you are unhappy with this choice, this is free software
182 and you are free to take a crack at making this work. The code
183 in w32/pathstuff.c and vpath.c would be the places to start.
185 Pathnames and Case insensitivity:
187 Unlike Unix, Windows 95/NT systems are case insensitive but case
188 preserving. For example if you tell the file system to create a
189 file named "Target", it will preserve the case. Subsequent access to
190 the file with other case permutations will succeed (i.e. opening a
191 file named "target" or "TARGET" will open the file "Target").
193 By default, GNU make retains its case sensitivity when comparing
194 target names and existing files or directories. It can be
195 configured, however, into a case preserving and case insensitive
196 mode by adding a define for HAVE_CASE_INSENSITIVE_FS to
199 For example, the following makefile will create a file named
200 Target in the directory subdir which will subsequently be used
201 to satisfy the dependency of SUBDIR/DepTarget on SubDir/TARGET.
202 Without HAVE_CASE_INSENSITIVE_FS configured, the dependency link
208 SUBDIR/DepTarget: SubDir/TARGET
211 Reliance on this behavior also eliminates the ability of GNU make
212 to use case in comparison of matching rules. For example, it is
213 not possible to set up a C++ rule using %.C that is different
214 than a C rule using %.c. GNU make will consider these to be the
215 same rule and will issue a warning.
219 I have not had any success building the debug version of this
220 package using SAMBA as my file server. The reason seems to be
221 related to the way VC++ 4.0 changes the case name of the pdb
222 filename it is passed on the command line. It seems to change
223 the name always to to lower case. I contend that
224 the VC++ compiler should not change the casename of files that
225 are passed as arguments on the command line. I don't think this
226 was a problem in MSVC 2.x, but I know it is a problem in MSVC 4.x.
228 The package builds fine on VFAT and NTFS filesystems.
230 Most all of the development I have done to date has been using
231 NTFS and long file names. I have not done any considerable work
232 under VFAT. VFAT users may wish to be aware that this port
233 of make does respect case sensitivity.
237 Version 3.76 added support for FAT filesystems. Make
238 works around some difficulties with stat'ing of
239 files and caching of filenames and directories internally.
243 Please submit bugs via the normal bug reporting mechanism which
244 is described in the GNU make manual and the base README.