path: root/README.win32

Tor Lillqvist <tml@iki.fi>
Hans Breuer <hans@breuer.org>

The general parts, and the stuff about gcc and autoconfiscated build
are by Tor Lillqvist. The stuff about MSVC build is by Hans Breuer.

General
=======

For prebuilt binaries (DLLs and EXEs) and developer packages (headers,
import libraries) of GLib, GTK+, GIMP etc for Windows, surf to
http://www.gimp.org/win32/ . They are for "native" Windows meaning
they use the Win32 API and Microsoft C runtime library only, no POSIX
(Unix) emulation layer (like Cygwin). 

To build GLib on Win32, you can use either gcc or the Microsoft
compiler and tools. Both the compiler from MSVC 5.0 and from MSVC 6.0
have been used successfully.

But note that to just *use* GLib on Windows, there is no need to build
it yourself. Prepackaged runtime and developer packages are available
from the webiste above. On Unix, it is quite normal that system admins
build and install libraries like GLib themselves. But on Windows
setting up a correct build environment can be quite a task, especially
if you are used to on Unix just type ./configure; make, and expect
things to work as smoothly on Windows.

The following preprocessor macros can be used for conditional
compilation related to Win32 in GLib-using code:

- G_OS_WIN32 is defined when compiling for native Win32, without
  any POSIX emulation, other than to the extent provided by the
  bundled Microsoft C library (msvcrt.dll).

- G_WITH_CYGWIN is defined if compiling for the Cygwin
  environment. Note that G_OS_WIN32 is *not* defined in that case, as
  Cygwin is supposed to behave like Unix. G_OS_UNIX *is* defined when
  compiling for Cygwin.

- G_PLATFORM_WIN32 is defined when either G_OS_WIN32 or G_WITH_CYGWIN
  is defined.

These macros are defined in glibconfig.h, and are thus (indirectly)
available in all source files that include <glib.h> or GTK+ headers.

Additionally, there are the compiler-specific macros:
- __GNUC__ is defined when using gcc
- _MSC_VER is defined when using the Microsoft compiler

G_OS_WIN32 implies using the Microsoft C runtime MSVCRT.DLL. GLib is
not known to work with the older CRTDLL.DLL runtime, or the static
Microsoft C runtime libraries LIBC.LIB and LIBCMT.LIB. It apparently
does work with the debugging version of MSVCRT.DLL, MSVCRTD.DLL.

Building software that use GLib or GTK+
=======================================

Even building software that just *uses* GLib or GTK+ also require to
have the right compiler set up the right way, so if you intend to use
gcc, follow the relevant instructions below in that case, too.

Tor uses gcc with the -fnative-struct flag, which means that in order to
use the prebuilt DLLs (especially of GTK+), you *must* also use that
flag. (This flag means that the struct layout rules are identical to
those used by MSVC. This is essential if the same DLLs are to be
usable both from gcc- and MSVC-compiled code. This definitely is
something one wants.)

Building GLib
=============

Again, first decide whether you really want to do this.

Before building GLib you must also have the libiconv library, either
from the same website mentioned above, or from it's homepage at
http://clisp.cons.org/~haible/packages-libiconv.html. Libiconv has
makefiles for building with MS Visual C only, but as it is one source
file only, building it "by hand" with gcc isn't hard.

You must also have the "intl" library from GNU tettext 0.10.40 (or
later). Get a prebuilt version from the website mentioned above.

Edit the correct paths to those libraries in build/win32/module.defs
as appropriate.

Where are the makefiles?
========================

If you are building from a CVS snapshot, you will not have any
makefile.mingw or makefile.msc files. You should copy the
corresponding makefile.mingw.in or makefile.msc.in file to that name,
and replace any @...@ strings with the correct value.

This is done automatically when an official GLib source distribution
package is built, so if you get GLib from a source distribution
package, there should be makefile.mingw and makefile.msc files ready
to use (after some editing).

Building GLib with gcc
======================

Tor uses gcc-2.95.3. Version 2.95.2 will most probably also work.

You can either use gcc running on Cygwin, or the "pure" mingw
gcc. Using the latter might work better, or at least did at some
point.

Fetch the latest version of gcc for mingw and the msvcrt runtime, from
www.mingw.org.

Set up your PATH so that the gcc from the bin directory that got
created above is the one that gets used. Even if you run the mingw
gcc, you still want to have Cygwin to run make in.

Then run make -f makefile.mingw. Install the resulting DLLs somewhere
in your PATH. You can either keep the headers and import libraries
where they are, or install them somewhere else. There are no rules in
the makefile.mingws for installing, it is up to you where to put them.

Autoconfiscated build
=====================

It is also possible to use the auto*, ./configure and libtool
mechanism when building with gcc. You should be running Cygwin, or
maybe cross-compiling from real Unix, for the configure script to
work, obviously. (It might also be possible to use "MSYS", but I
haven't checked.) You most probably should have very new auto* and
libtool. Tor invokes configure using:

CC='gcc -mpentium -fnative-struct'
  CPPFLAGS='-I/src/libiconv-1.7/include -I/target/include'
  LDFLAGS='-L/src/libiconv-1.7/lib -L/target/lib' ./configure
  --with-libiconv --disable-static --prefix=/target
  --host=i386-pc-mingw32 --enable-maintainer-mode

(on a single line)

But please note that the ./configure mechanism should not blindly be
used to build a GLib to be distributed to other developers because it
produces a compiler-dependent glibconfig.h (and config.h, but that
shouldn't matter, as it isn't seen by GLib-using applications). For
instance, the typedef for gint64 is long long with gcc, but __int64
with MSVC.

Except for this and a few other minor issues, there really shouldn't
be any reason to distribute separate GLib headers and DLLs for gcc and
MSVC users, as both compilers generate code that uses the same C
runtime library. Thus one either has to manually edit glibconfig.h
afterwards, or use the supplied config.h.win32 and
glibconfig.h.win32. These have been produced by running configure
twice, once using gcc and once using MSVC, and merging the resulting
files with diff -D.

There might be other hickups when using auto* and configure to build
with gcc. Lately Tor has used auto*/configure/libtool exclusively when
building GLib, GTK+, GIMP etc on Win32, and it seems to work well
(with some patches applied to the current CVS libtool...).

The hand-written makefile.{mingw,msc} files, and the stuff in the
"build" subdirectory, produce DLLs and import libraries that match
what Makefile.am and libtool produces. For GLib, the DLL is called
libglib-1.3-15.dll (at GLib 1.3.15), and the import libraries
libglib-1.3.dll.a and glib-1.3.lib. Note that the "1.3" is part of the
"basename" of the library, it is not something that libtool have
tucked on. The -15 suffix is the value of "LT_CURRENT - LT_AGE". The
15 is *not* simply the micro version number of GLib, although, for
GLib 1.3.15, it happens to be the same. For the gory details, see
configure.in and libtool documentation.

If you want to run the Cygwin-hosted gcc, and still want to produce
code that does not use Cygwin, but the msvcrt runtime, in theory it
should work to use the -no-cygwin flag, but Tor hasn't tested that
lately.

If you would want to use the Cygwin tools to generate a GLib that
*does* use the Cygwin runtime, the normal Unix configuration method
should work as if on Unix. Note that successfully producing shared
libraries (DLLs) for Cygwin most probably requires you to have a very
new libtool. (And a new libtool probably requires rather new autoconf
and automake.) Tor hasn't tested this in a while.

Building with MSVC
==================

All the MSVC makefiles are for the command line build with nmake.
If you want to use the VC-UI you can simply create wrapper .dsp
makefiles (read the VC docs how to do so).

Some modules may require Perl to auto-generate files. The goal (at
least Hans's) is to not require any more tools.

Build with:

nmake -f makefile.msc
  or
nmake -f makefile.msc DEBUG=1

[
 The former will create 'release' versions of the DLLs. If you
 plan to distribute you DLLs please use this command. The latter 
 will create DLLs with debug information _and_ link them with
 msvcrtd.dll instead of msvcrt.dll. 
 Beware: There are known problems with mixing DLLs in one 
 application, which are build against different runtimes. 
 Especially the index-to-file mapping used by 'unix-style' file
 operation - _open() _pipe() etc. - breaks sometimes in strange 
 ways (for example the Gimp plug-in communication).
]

Required libraries (not build from cvs)
==================
  libintl (gnu-intl), libiconv
  libtiff, libpng, zlib, libjpeg

are available pre-built from the website mentioned above.

Versioning
==========
Instead of the Unix and auto* way of tracking versions and resolving
dependencies (configure; make; make install) involving autoconf,
automake, libtool and friends the MSVC build uses a different
approach.

The core of it's versioning is the file build/win32/module.defs.
It contains entries of the form MODULE_VER, e.g.:

	GLIB_VER = 2.0
	LIBICONV_VER = 1.3

and the placement of these modules defined as MODULE, e.g.:

	GLIB = $(TOP)/glib
	LIBICONV = $(TOP)/libiconv-$(LIBICONV_VER)

whereas TOP is defined as the relative path from the respective
module directory to your top build directory. Every makefile.msc
needs to define TOP before including the common make file part
make.msc, which than includes module.defs, like:

TOP = ../..
!INCLUDE $(TOP)/glib/build/win32/make.msc

(Taken from gtk+/gdk/makefile.msc)

With this provision it is possible to create almost placement
independent makefiles without requiring to 'install' the libraries and
headers into a common place (as it is done on Unix, and as Tor does
when producing his zipfiles with prebuilt GLib, GTK+ etc).

Special Files
=============
	config.h.win32.in : @XXX_MAJOR_VERSION@ needs to be replaced by
the current version/build number. The resulting file is to be saved
as 'config.h.win32'. This should be automatically done if a package
gets build on the Unix platform.

	makefile.msc.in : @XXX_MAJOR_VERSION@ to be replaced. Save as
makefile.msc.

	<module>.def : every function which should be used from the outside of
a dll needs to be marked for 'export'. It is common that one needs to change 
these files after some api changes occured. If there are variables to be
exported another mechanism is needed, like :

	#ifdef G_OS_WIN32
	#  ifdef GDK_COMPILATION
	#    define GDKVAR __declspec(dllexport)
	#  else
	#    define GDKVAR extern __declspec(dllimport)
	#  endif
	#else
	#  define GDKVAR extern
	#endif



Directory Structure
===================
all modules should be build in a common directory tree otherwise you 
need to adapt the file 'module.defs'. They are listed here in increasing
dependencies order.

<common rootdir without spaces>
  |
  +- glib
  |   |
  |   +- build          : [this module lives in the cvs root dir]
  |   |   +- win32
  |   |       .\module.defs : defines (relative) locations of the headers
  |   |                       and libs and version numbers to be include 
  |   |                       in dll names
  |   |       .\make.msc    : include by almost every 'makefile.msc'
  |   |
  |   | .\README.WIN32  : more information how to build
  |   | .\glibconfig.h.win32.in : similar to config.h.win32.in
  |   | .\makefile.msc  : master makefile, sub dir makefiles should work 
  |   |
  |   +- glib
  |   +- gmodule
  |   +- gthread        : does _not_ depend on pthread anymore
  |   +- gobject
  |
  +- pango
  |   +- pango          : 'native' build does not require extra libs and
  |   |                 includes the minimal required text renderer
  |   |                 (there is also a currently slightly broken FreeType2 
  |   |                 based implementation for win32)
  |   +- modules (not yet build)
  |
  +- atk
  |   +- atk
  |       .\makefile.msc : build here
  |
  +- gtk+
  |   | .\config.h.win32 : for all the below
  |   |
  |   +- gdk-pixbuf
  |   |   .\gdk_pixbuf.rc.in : version resource for the DLLs. Needs
  |   |                 to be converted (filled with version info)
  |   |                 as described above.
  |   |
  |   +- gdk
  |   |   | .\makefile.msc : some auto-generation is needed to build in the
  |   |   |             in the subdirectory 
  |   |   +- win32
  |   |
  |   +- gtk

  |
  +- gimp
  |   .\makefile.msc    : master makefile to build The Gimp. The makefiles
  |                     from the sub dirs should work stand alone, but than
  |                     the user needs to know the build order

  |
  +- dia                : additionally depends on libart_lgpl (in cvs)
      |                 and libxml2 ( see http://www.xmlsoft.org/ )
      +- lib
      +- app
      +- objects
      +- plug-ins
          +- python