BuildingOnWindows

The officially supported build environment for monotone on Windows is MinGW. The exact requirements are listed below.

Building monotone under Cygwin is also known to work. monotone is also included as a package in all Cygwin mirrors and can be easily installed using Cygwin's installer.

Building with Microsoft Services For Unix is untested, but would probably work without too much difficulty.

Support for building using Visual Studio 8 is available, but we don't have a VC8 buildbot so sometimes the build is broken. See BuildingOnWindows/VisualC8.

Installing the toolchain

This section is preliminary setup--once this has been completed once, you can rebuild monotone regularly using only the instructions in the next section.

• Newer versions of the tools listed above are likely to work without too much trouble.

Installation instructions

The installer defaults put MinGW in c:\MinGW and MSYS in c:\Msys. However, later steps sometimes install new items in c:\MinGW\bin, and sometimes in c:\Msys\bin. So it is difficult to ensure that the new items are always first in path. Installing MinGW and MSYS both to c:\MinGW avoids this issue. However, in this case the MSYS installer mistakenly renames 'make' to 'mingw32-make', so we need to change it back.

msysDTK installs Perl, CVS, crypt, and other tools needed by the autoconf tools. The installed autoconf scripts are a little broken, so we need to manually fix them.

1. MinGW - install, accept defaults but add g++ on the package selection page

2. MSYS - install to same directory as MinGW (c:\MinGW), otherwise accept defaults

3. msysDTK - install into MinGW directory

4. Rename 'make'

   1. $ mv /bin/mingw32-make.exe /bin/make.exe
      

5. wget

   1. $ mkdir -p /usr/src
      $ cd /usr/src
      $ tar jxf wget-1.9.1-mingwPORT.tar.bz2
      $ cd wget-1.9.1/mingwPORT
      $ cp -a wget.exe /mingw/bin
      $ ./mingwPORT.sh
      

   2. Accept all defaults by hitting the enter key. The following steps also always accept all defaults.

6. libiconv

   1. $ cd /usr/src
      $ export SRCROOT=/usr/src
      $ tar jxf libiconv-1.11-mingwPORT.tar.bz2
      $ cd libiconv-1.11/mingwPORT
      $ ./mingwPORT.sh
      

7. autoconf

   1. $ cd /usr/src
      $ tar jxf autoconf-2.59-mingwPORT.tar.bz2
      $ cd autoconf-2.59/mingwPORT
      $ ./mingwPORT.sh
      

   2. Open /mingw/bin/autoconf in an editor and change the following line:

      • from something like

        : ${AUTOM4TE='c:/mingw/bin/autom4te'}
        

      • to

        : ${AUTOM4TE='/mingw/bin/autom4te'}
        

8. automake

   1. $ cd /usr/src
      $ tar jxf automake-1.9.5-mingwPORT.tar.bz2
      $ cd automake-1.9.5/mingwPORT
      $ ./mingwPORT.sh
      

   2. Open the files /mingw/bin/aclocal, /mingw/bin/aclocal-1.9, and all files matching auto* in an editor and delete c:/ from all paths, as was done above for autoconf.

9. zlib

   1. $ cd /usr/src
      $ tar jxf zlib-1.2.3-mingwPORT.tar.bz2
      $ cd zlib-1.2.3/mingwPORT
      $ ./mingwPORT.sh
      

10. gettext

    1. $ cd /usr/src
       $ tar zxf gettext-0.16.1.tar.gz
       $ cd gettext-0.16.1
       $ wget 'http://cvs.savannah.gnu.org/viewvc/gettext/gettext/gettext-runtime/intl/\
       localename.c?r1=1.15&r2=1.16&view=patch' -O localename_1.15-1.16.patch
       $ cd gettext-runtime/intl
       $ patch -p0 < ../../localename_1.15-1.16.patch
       $ cd ../..
       $ ./configure --prefix=/mingw
       $ make install
       

    2. If the wget command here fails, get the patch manually:

       http://cvs.savannah.gnu.org/viewvc/gettext/gettext/gettext-runtime/intl/\
       localename.c?view=log
       on version 1.15, click "select for diffs"
       on version 1.16, click "diff to previous 1.15"
       near top of page, click on "patch"
       save file as c:/Downloads/mingw/localename_1.15-1.16.patch
       

11. boost; only need headers

    1. $ cd /usr/src
       $ tar jxf boost_1_34_1.tar.bz2
       $ cd boost_1_34_1
       $ cp -a boost /mingw/include
       

Building monotone

1. Install a pre-built monotone binary from http://monotone.ca/downloads/

2. Follow the self-hosting instructions at SelfHostingInfo to get a copy of the monotone repository.

3. $ mtn -d /path/to/monotone.db -b net.venge.monotone co monotone
   $ cd monotone
   $ autoreconf -i
   $ ./configure
   $ make
   

4. And to run the testsuite:

   $ make check
   

Notes

• If the ./configure step of the monotone build fails claiming your system is unrecognized while checking the build system type, it may be caused by uname -s returning a string containing MSYS rather than MINGW. This indicates that your build environment is in a special mode for producing MSYS binaries, which is not what you want when building monotone. See the following URL for a detailed explanation: http://www.mingw.org/MinGWiki/index.php/MsysBuildEnvironment

• If you get strange errors from perl when running autoreconf -i, check that you edited the paths correctly in aclocal-* and auto*.