1 This version of GNU make has been tested on Microsoft Windows 2000/XP/2003.
2 It has also been used on Windows 95/98/NT, and on OS/2.
4 It builds natively with MSVC 2.x, 4.x, 5.x, 6.x, and 2003 as well as
5 .NET 7.x and .NET 2003.
7 It builds with the MinGW port of GCC 3.x (tested with GCC 3.4.2).
9 The Windows 32-bit port of GNU make is maintained jointly by various
10 people. It was originally made by Rob Tulloh.
13 Do this first, regardless of the build method you choose:
14 ---------------------------------------------------------
16 1. At the Windows command prompt run:
18 if not exist NMakefile copy NMakefile.template NMakefile
19 if not exist config.h copy config.h.W32 config.h
21 Then edit config.h to your liking (especially the few shell-related
22 defines near the end, or HAVE_CASE_INSENSITIVE_FS which corresponds
23 to './configure --enable-case-insensitive-file-system').
26 Using make_msvc_net2003.vcproj
27 ------------------------------
29 2. Open make_msvc_net2003.vcproj in MSVS71 or MSVC71 or any compatible IDE,
30 then build this project as usual.
33 Building with (MinGW-)GCC using build_w32.bat
34 ---------------------------------------------
36 2. Open a W32 command prompt for your installed (MinGW-)GCC, setup a
37 correct PATH and other environment variables for it, then execute ...
41 This produces gnumake.exe in the current directory.
44 Building with (MSVC++-)cl using build_w32.bat or NMakefile
45 ----------------------------------------------------------
47 2. Open a W32 command prompt for your installed (MSVC++-)cl, setup a
48 correct PATH and other environment variables for it (usually via
49 executing vcvars32.bat or vsvars32.bat from the cl-installation,
50 e.g. "%VS71COMNTOOLS%vsvars32.bat"; or using a corresponding start
51 menue entry from the cl-installation), then execute EITHER ...
55 (this produces WinDebug/gnumake.exe and WinRel/gnumake.exe)
61 (this produces WinDebug/make.exe and WinRel/make.exe).
68 GNU make on Windows 32-bit platforms:
70 This version of make is ported natively to Windows32 platforms
71 (Windows NT 3.51, Windows NT 4.0, Windows 95, and Windows 98). It
72 does not rely on any 3rd party software or add-on packages for
73 building. The only thing needed is a version of Visual C++,
74 which is the predominant compiler used on Windows32 platforms.
76 Do not confuse this port of GNU make with other Windows32 projects
77 which provide a GNU make binary. These are separate projects
78 and are not connected to this port effort.
82 This port prefers you have a working sh.exe somewhere on your
83 system. If you don't have sh.exe, the port falls back to
84 MSDOS mode for launching programs (via a batch file).
85 The MSDOS mode style execution has not been tested that
86 carefully though (The author uses GNU bash as sh.exe).
88 There are very few true ports of Bourne shell for NT right now.
89 There is a version of GNU bash available from Cygnus "Cygwin"
90 porting effort (http://www.cygwin.com/).
91 Other possibilities are the MKS version of sh.exe, or building
92 your own with a package like NutCracker (DataFocus) or Portage
93 (Consensys). Also MinGW includes sh (http://mingw.org/).
95 GNU make and brain-dead shells (BATCH_MODE_ONLY_SHELL):
97 Some versions of Bourne shell do not behave well when invoked
98 as 'sh -c' from CreateProcess(). The main problem is they seem
99 to have a hard time handling quoted strings correctly. This can
100 be circumvented by writing commands to be executed to a batch
101 file and then executing the command by calling 'sh file'.
103 To work around this difficulty, this version of make supports
104 a batch mode. When BATCH_MODE_ONLY_SHELL is defined at compile
105 time, make forces all command lines to be executed via script
106 files instead of by command line. In this mode you must have a
107 working sh.exe in order to use parallel builds (-j).
109 A native Windows32 system with no Bourne shell will also run
110 in batch mode. All command lines will be put into batch files
111 and executed via $(COMSPEC) (%COMSPEC%). Note that parallel
112 builds (-j) require a working Bourne shell; they will not work
115 GNU make and Cygnus GNU Windows32 tools:
117 Good news! Make now has native support for Cygwin sh. To enable,
118 define the HAVE_CYGWIN_SHELL in config.h and rebuild make
119 from scratch. This version of make tested with B20.1 of Cygwin.
120 Do not define BATCH_MODE_ONLY_SHELL if you use HAVE_CYGWIN_SHELL.
122 GNU make and the MKS shell:
124 There is now semi-official support for the MKS shell. To turn this
125 support on, define HAVE_MKS_SHELL in the config.h.W32 before you
126 build make. Do not define BATCH_MODE_ONLY_SHELL if you turn
129 GNU make handling of drive letters in pathnames (PATH, vpath, VPATH):
131 There is a caveat that should be noted with respect to handling
132 single character pathnames on Windows systems. When colon is
133 used in PATH variables, make tries to be smart about knowing when
134 you are using colon as a separator versus colon as a drive
135 letter. Unfortunately, something as simple as the string 'x:/'
136 could be interpreted 2 ways: (x and /) or (x:/).
138 Make chooses to interpret a letter plus colon (e.g. x:/) as a
139 drive letter pathname. If it is necessary to use single
140 character directories in paths (VPATH, vpath, Path, PATH), the
141 user must do one of two things:
143 a. Use semicolon as the separator to disambiguate colon. For
144 example use 'x;/' if you want to say 'x' and '/' are
147 b. Qualify the directory name so that there is more than
148 one character in the path(s) used. For example, none
149 of these settings are ambiguous:
152 /some/path/x:/some/path/y
153 x:/some/path/x:x:/some/path/y
155 Please note that you are free to mix colon and semi-colon in the
156 specification of paths. Make is able to figure out the intended
157 result and convert the paths internally to the format needed
158 when interacting with the operating system, providing the path
159 is not within quotes, e.g. "x:/test/test.c".
161 You are encouraged to use colon as the separator character.
162 This should ease the pain of deciding how to handle various path
163 problems which exist between platforms. If colon is used on
164 both Unix and Windows systems, then no ifdef'ing will be
165 necessary in the makefile source.
169 I verified all functionality with a slightly modified version
170 of make-test-%VERSION% (modifications to get test suite to run
171 on Windows NT). All tests pass in an environment that includes
172 sh.exe. Tests were performed on both Windows NT and Windows 95.
174 Building GNU make on Windows NT and Windows 95/98 with Microsoft Visual C:
176 I did not provide a Visual C project file with this port as
177 the project file would not be considered freely distributable
178 (or so I think). It is easy enough to create one, though, if
179 you know how to use Visual C.
181 I build the program statically to avoid problems locating DLL's
182 on machines that may not have MSVC runtime installed. If you
183 prefer, you can change make to build with shared libraries by
184 changing /MT to /MD in the NMakefile (or in build_w32.bat).
186 The program has not been built for non-Intel architectures (yet).
188 I have not tried to build with any other compilers than MSVC. I
189 have heard that this is possible though so don't be afraid to
190 notify me of your successes!
192 Pathnames and white space:
194 Unlike Unix, Windows 95/NT systems encourage pathnames which
195 contain white space (e.g. C:\Program Files\). These sorts of
196 pathnames are legal under Unix too, but are never encouraged.
197 There is at least one place in make (VPATH/vpath handling) where
198 paths containing white space will simply not work. There may be
199 others too. I chose to not try and port make in such a way so
200 that these sorts of paths could be handled. I offer these
201 suggestions as workarounds:
203 1. Use 8.3 notation. i.e. "x:/long~1/", which is actually
204 "x:\longpathtest". Type "dir /x" to view these filenames
205 within the cmd.exe shell.
206 2. Rename the directory so it does not contain white space.
208 If you are unhappy with this choice, this is free software
209 and you are free to take a crack at making this work. The code
210 in w32/pathstuff.c and vpath.c would be the places to start.
212 Pathnames and Case insensitivity:
214 Unlike Unix, Windows 95/NT systems are case insensitive but case
215 preserving. For example if you tell the file system to create a
216 file named "Target", it will preserve the case. Subsequent access to
217 the file with other case permutations will succeed (i.e. opening a
218 file named "target" or "TARGET" will open the file "Target").
220 By default, GNU make retains its case sensitivity when comparing
221 target names and existing files or directories. It can be
222 configured, however, into a case preserving and case insensitive
223 mode by adding a define for HAVE_CASE_INSENSITIVE_FS to
226 For example, the following makefile will create a file named
227 Target in the directory subdir which will subsequently be used
228 to satisfy the dependency of SUBDIR/DepTarget on SubDir/TARGET.
229 Without HAVE_CASE_INSENSITIVE_FS configured, the dependency link
235 SUBDIR/DepTarget: SubDir/TARGET
238 Reliance on this behavior also eliminates the ability of GNU make
239 to use case in comparison of matching rules. For example, it is
240 not possible to set up a C++ rule using %.C that is different
241 than a C rule using %.c. GNU make will consider these to be the
242 same rule and will issue a warning.
246 I have not had any success building the debug version of this
247 package using SAMBA as my file server. The reason seems to be
248 related to the way VC++ 4.0 changes the case name of the pdb
249 filename it is passed on the command line. It seems to change
250 the name always to to lower case. I contend that the VC++
251 compiler should not change the casename of files that are passed
252 as arguments on the command line. I don't think this was a
253 problem in MSVC 2.x, but I know it is a problem in MSVC 4.x.
255 The package builds fine on VFAT and NTFS filesystems.
257 Most all of the development I have done to date has been using
258 NTFS and long file names. I have not done any considerable work
259 under VFAT. VFAT users may wish to be aware that this port of
260 make does respect case sensitivity.
264 Version 3.76 added support for FAT filesystems. Make works
265 around some difficulties with stat'ing of files and caching of
266 filenames and directories internally.
270 Please submit bugs via the normal bug reporting mechanism which
271 is described in the GNU make manual and the base README.
273 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
274 Copyright (C) 1988, 1989, 1990, 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997,
275 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2005, 2006 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
276 This file is part of GNU Make.
278 GNU Make is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the
279 terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software
280 Foundation; either version 2, or (at your option) any later version.
282 GNU Make is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY
283 WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR
284 A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.
286 You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with
287 GNU Make; see the file COPYING. If not, write to the Free Software
288 Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin St, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301 USA.