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 possibilites 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 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.