make/README.W32

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Port of GNU make to Windows NT and Windows 95
Builds natively with MSVC 2.x or MSVC 4.x compilers.
To build with nmake on Windows NT or Windows 95:
1. Make sure cl.exe is in your %Path%. Example:
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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
There is a bat file (build_w32.bat) for folks who have fear of nmake.
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Outputs:
WinDebug/make.exe
WinRel/make.exe
-- Notes/Caveats --
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, port falls back to
MSDOS mode for launching programs (via a batch file).
The MSDOS mode style execution has not been tested too
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carefully though (I use GNU bash as sh.exe).
There are very few true ports of Bourne shell for NT right now.
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There is a version of GNU bash available from Cygnus gnu-win32
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porting effort. Other possibilities are to get the MKS version
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of sh.exe or to build your own with a package like
NutCracker (DataFocus) or Portage (Consensys).
Tivoli uses a homegrown port of GNU bash which is not (yet)
freely available. It may be available someday, but I am not in control
of this decision nor do I influence it. Sorry!
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GNU make and Cygnus GNU WIN32 tools (BATCH_MODE_ONLY_SHELL)
GNU make now has support for the Cygnus GNU WIN32 toolset. The
GNU WIN32 version of Bourne shell does not behave well when
invoked as 'sh -c' from CreateProcess(). The main problem is it
seems to have a hard time handling quoted strings correctly. This
problem goes away when invoking the Cygnus shell on a shell script.
To work around this difficulty, this version of make supports
a new 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 WIN32 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%).
If you wish to use Cygnus' GNUWIN32 shell, be sure you define
BATCH_MODE_ONLY_SHELL in the config.h.W32 prior to building make.
The new feataure was tested with the b18 version of the Cygnus
user tools.
GNU make and 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.
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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
These caveats affect Windows systems only (Windows NT and
Windows 95) and can be ignored for other platforms.
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-0.4.5 (modifications to get test suite to run
on Windows NT). All tests pass in an environment that includes
sh.exe. Tested on both Windows NT and Windows 95.
Building GNU make on Windows NT and Windows 95 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
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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
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changing /MT to /MD in the NMakefile (or build_w32.bat).
Program has not been built under non-Intel architectures (yet).
I have not tried to build with any other compilers than MSVC.
Pathnames and white space:
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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:
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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.
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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.
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Version 3.76 contains some preliminary support for FAT. Make
now tries to work around some difficulties with stat'ing of
files and caching of filenames and directories internally.
There is still a known problem with filenames sometimes being
found to have modification dates in the future which cause make
to complain about the file and exit (remake.c).
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Bug reports:
Please submit bugs via the normal bug reporting mechanism
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which is described in one of the Texinfo files. If you don't
have Texinfo for Windows NT or Windows 95, these files are simple
text files and can be read with a text editor.