1Port of GNU make to Windows NT and Windows 95 2Builds natively with MSVC 2.x or MSVC 4.x compilers. 3Should also build fine with MSVC 5.x and 6.x (though not confirmed). 4 5This Windows 32-bit port of GNU make is maintained primarily by Rob 6Tulloh, who is also the author of this README. 7 8To build with nmake on Windows NT, Windows 95, or Windows 98: 9 10 1. Make sure cl.exe is in your %Path%. Example: 11 12 set Path=%Path%;c:/msdev/bin 13 14 2. Make sure %include% is set to msvc include directory. Example: 15 16 set include=c:/msdev/include 17 18 3. Make sure %lib% is set to msvc lib directory. Example: 19 20 set lib=c:/msdev/lib 21 22 4. nmake /f NMakefile 23 24 25 A short cut to steps 1, 2, and 3 is to run VCVARS32.bat before 26 invoking namke. For example: 27 28 c: 29 cd \msdev\bin 30 VCVARS32.bat 31 cd \path\to\make-3.80 32 nmake /f NMakefile 33 34There is a bat file (build_w32.bat) for folks who have fear of nmake. 35 36Outputs: 37 38 WinDebug/make.exe 39 WinRel/make.exe 40 41 42-- Notes/Caveats -- 43 44GNU make on Windows 32-bit platforms: 45 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. 51 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. 55 56GNU make and sh.exe: 57 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). 63 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 69 (Consensys). 70 71GNU make and brain-dead shells (BATCH_MODE_ONLY_SHELL): 72 73 Some versions of Bourne shell does 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'. 78 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. 83 84 A native Windows32 system with no Bourne shell will also run 85 in batch mode. All command lines will be put into batch files 86 and executed via $(COMSPEC) (%COMSPEC%). 87 88GNU make and Cygnus GNU Windows32 tools: 89 90 Good news! Make now has native support for Cygwin sh. To enable, 91 define the HAVE_CYGWIN_SHELL in config.h and rebuild make 92 from scratch. This version of make tested with B20.1 of Cygwin. 93 Do not define BATCH_MODE_ONLY_SHELL if you use HAVE_CYGWIN_SHELL. 94 95GNU make and the MKS shell: 96 97 There is now semi-official support for the MKS shell. To turn this 98 support on, define HAVE_MKS_SHELL in the config.h.W32 before you 99 build make. Do not define BATCH_MODE_ONLY_SHELL if you turn 100 on HAVE_MKS_SHELL. 101 102GNU make handling of drive letters in pathnames (PATH, vpath, VPATH): 103 104 There is a caveat that should be noted with respect to handling 105 single character pathnames on Windows systems. When colon is 106 used in PATH variables, make tries to be smart about knowing when 107 you are using colon as a separator versus colon as a drive 108 letter. Unfortunately, something as simple as the string 'x:/' 109 could be interpreted 2 ways: (x and /) or (x:/). 110 111 Make chooses to interpret a letter plus colon (e.g. x:/) as a 112 drive letter pathname. If it is necessary to use single 113 character directories in paths (VPATH, vpath, Path, PATH), the 114 user must do one of two things: 115 116 a. Use semicolon as the separator to disambiguate colon. For 117 example use 'x;/' if you want to say 'x' and '/' are 118 separate components. 119 120 b. Qualify the directory name so that there is more than 121 one character in the path(s) used. For example, none 122 of these settings are ambiguous: 123 124 ./x:./y 125 /some/path/x:/some/path/y 126 x:/some/path/x:x:/some/path/y 127 128 Please note that you are free to mix colon and semi-colon in the 129 specification of paths. Make is able to figure out the intended 130 result and convert the paths internally to the format needed 131 when interacting with the operating system. 132 133 You are encouraged to use colon as the separator character. 134 This should ease the pain of deciding how to handle various path 135 problems which exist between platforms. If colon is used on 136 both Unix and Windows systems, then no ifdef'ing will be 137 necessary in the makefile source. 138 139GNU make test suite: 140 141 I verified all functionality with a slightly modified version 142 of make-test-3.80 (modifications to get test suite to run 143 on Windows NT). All tests pass in an environment that includes 144 sh.exe. Tests were performed on both Windows NT and Windows 95. 145 146Building GNU make on Windows NT and Windows 95/98 with Microsoft Visual C: 147 148 I did not provide a Visual C project file with this port as 149 the project file would not be considered freely distributable 150 (or so I think). It is easy enough to create one, though, if 151 you know how to use Visual C. 152 153 I build the program statically to avoid problems locating DLL's 154 on machines that may not have MSVC runtime installed. If you 155 prefer, you can change make to build with shared libraries by 156 changing /MT to /MD in the NMakefile (or in build_w32.bat). 157 158 The program has not been built for non-Intel architectures (yet). 159 160 I have not tried to build with any other compilers than MSVC. I 161 have heard that this is possible though so don't be afraid to 162 notify me of your successes! 163 164Pathnames and white space: 165 166 Unlike Unix, Windows 95/NT systems encourage pathnames which 167 contain white space (e.g. C:\Program Files\). These sorts of pathnames 168 are legal under Unix too, but are never encouraged. There is 169 at least one place in make (VPATH/vpath handling) where paths 170 containing white space will simply not work. There may be others 171 too. I chose to not try and port make in such a way so that 172 these sorts of paths could be handled. I offer these suggestions 173 as workarounds: 174 175 1. Use 8.3 notation 176 2. Rename the directory so it does not contain white space. 177 178 If you are unhappy with this choice, this is free software 179 and you are free to take a crack at making this work. The code 180 in w32/pathstuff.c and vpath.c would be the places to start. 181 182Pathnames and Case insensitivity: 183 184 Unlike Unix, Windows 95/NT systems are case insensitive but case 185 preserving. For example if you tell the file system to create a 186 file named "Target", it will preserve the case. Subsequent access to 187 the file with other case permutations will succeed (i.e. opening a 188 file named "target" or "TARGET" will open the file "Target"). 189 190 By default, GNU make retains its case sensitivity when comparing 191 target names and existing files or directories. It can be 192 configured, however, into a case preserving and case insensitive 193 mode by adding a define for HAVE_CASE_INSENSITIVE_FS to 194 config.h.W32. 195 196 For example, the following makefile will create a file named 197 Target in the directory subdir which will subsequently be used 198 to satisfy the dependency of SUBDIR/DepTarget on SubDir/TARGET. 199 Without HAVE_CASE_INSENSITIVE_FS configured, the dependency link 200 will not be made: 201 202 subdir/Target: 203 touch $@ 204 205 SUBDIR/DepTarget: SubDir/TARGET 206 cp $^ $@ 207 208 Reliance on this behavior also eliminates the ability of GNU make 209 to use case in comparison of matching rules. For example, it is 210 not possible to set up a C++ rule using %.C that is different 211 than a C rule using %.c. GNU make will consider these to be the 212 same rule and will issue a warning. 213 214SAMBA/NTFS/VFAT: 215 216 I have not had any success building the debug version of this 217 package using SAMBA as my file server. The reason seems to be 218 related to the way VC++ 4.0 changes the case name of the pdb 219 filename it is passed on the command line. It seems to change 220 the name always to to lower case. I contend that 221 the VC++ compiler should not change the casename of files that 222 are passed as arguments on the command line. I don't think this 223 was a problem in MSVC 2.x, but I know it is a problem in MSVC 4.x. 224 225 The package builds fine on VFAT and NTFS filesystems. 226 227 Most all of the development I have done to date has been using 228 NTFS and long file names. I have not done any considerable work 229 under VFAT. VFAT users may wish to be aware that this port 230 of make does respect case sensitivity. 231 232FAT: 233 234 Version 3.76 added support for FAT filesystems. Make 235 works around some difficulties with stat'ing of 236 files and caching of filenames and directories internally. 237 238Bug reports: 239 240 Please submit bugs via the normal bug reporting mechanism which 241 is described in the GNU make manual and the base README. 242