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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:
-
- 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.
-
- 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
- carefully though (I use GNU bash as sh.exe).
-
- There are very few true ports of Bourne shell for NT right now.
- There is a version of GNU bash available from Cygnus gnu-win32
- porting effort. Other possibilities are to get the MKS version
- 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!
-
- 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
- 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
- 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:
-
- 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:
-
- 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.
-
- 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.
-
- 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).
-
- Bug reports:
-
- Please submit bugs via the normal bug reporting mechanism
- 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.
-
-