/contrib/groff/README.MinGW
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- README.MinGW
- ============
- Contributed by Keith Marshall (keith.d.marshall@ntlworld.com)
- INTRODUCTION
- ------------
- This file provides recommendations for building a Win32 implementation of
- GNU Groff, using the MinGW port of GCC for Microsoft (TM) Windows-32
- platforms. It is intended to supplement the standard installation
- instructions (see file INSTALL); it does not replace them.
- You require both the MinGW implementation of GCC and its supporting MSYS
- toolkit, which provides a Win-32 implementation of the GNU bash shell, and a
- few other essential utilities; these may be obtained from
- http://sourceforge.net/projects/mingw
- by following the appropriate download links, where they are available as
- self-extracting executable installation packages. If installing both from
- scratch, it is recommended that MinGW is installed first, as the MSYS
- installer can then automatically set up the proper environment for running
- MinGW.
- Additionally, if you wish to compile groff with support for its HTML output
- capability, some additional tools are required as decribed in the section
- PREREQUISITES FOR HTML OUTPUT later in this file.
- BUILDING GROFF WITH MINGW
- -------------------------
- Assuming that you have obtained the appropriate groff distribution, and that
- you are already running an MSYS shell, then the configuration, compilation,
- and installation of groff, using MinGW, is performed in much the same way as
- it is described in the INSTALL file, which is provided with the groff
- distribution. The installation steps are summarised below:
- 1. Change working directory to any suitable location where you may unpack
- the groff distribution; you must be authorized for write access.
- Approximately 30MB of free disk space are needed.
- 2. Unpack the groff distribution:
- tar xzf <download-path>/groff-<version>.tar.gz
- This creates a new sub-directory, groff-<version>, containing an image of
- the groff source tree. You should now change directory, to make this
- ./groff-<version> your working directory.
- 3. If you are intending to build groff with support for HTML output, then
- you must now ensure that the prerequisites described in the later section
- PREREQUISITES FOR HTML OUTPUT are satisfied, before proceeding to build
- groff; in particular, please ensure that all required support programs
- are installed in the current PATH.
- 4. You are now ready to configure, build, and install groff. This is
- accomplished using the conventional procedure, as described in the file
- INSTALL, i.e.
- ./configure --prefix=<win32-install-path> ...
- make
- make install
- Please observe the syntax for the configure command, indicated above; the
- default value for --prefix is not suitable for use with MinGW, so the
- --prefix=<win32-install-path> option must be specified, where
- <win32-install-path> is the chosen MS-Windows directory in which the
- groff application files are to be installed (see the later section
- entitled CHOOSING AN INSTALLATION PATH). Any other desired configuration
- options may also be specified, as described in the standard groff
- installation instructions.
- 5. After completing the above, groff should be successfully installed; the
- build directory is no longer required; it may be simply deleted in its
- entirety. Alternatively, you may choose to keep it, but to remove all
- files which can be reproduced later, by repeating the configure, make and
- make install steps; this is readily accomplished by the command
- make distclean
- This completes the installation of groff; please read the final sections of
- this file, GROFF RUNTIME ENVIRONMENT and CAVEATS AND BUGS, for advice on
- setting up the runtime environment, and avoiding known runtime problems,
- before running groff.
- CHOOSING AN INSTALLATION PATH
- -----------------------------
- It may be noted that the above instructions indicate that the ./configure
- command must be invoked with an argument specifying a preference for
- --prefix=<win32-install-path>, whereas the standard groff installation
- instructions indicate that this may be omitted, in which case it defaults to
- --prefix=/usr/local.
- In the case of building with MinGW, the default behaviour of configure is
- not appropriate for the following reasons.
- o The MSYS environment creates a virtual UNIX-like file system, with its
- root mapped to the actual MS-Windows directory where MSYS itself is
- installed; /usr is also mapped to this MSYS installation directory.
- o All of the MSYS tools, and the MinGW implementation of GCC, refer to files
- via this virtual file system representation; thus, if the
- --prefix=<win32-install-path> is not specified when groff is configured,
- `make install' causes groff to be installed in <MSYS-install-path>/local.
- o groff needs to know its own installation path, so that it can locate its
- own installed components. This information is compiled in, using the
- exact form specified with the --prefix=<win32-install-path> option to
- configure.
- o Knowledge of the MSYS virtual file system is not imparted to groff; it
- expects the compiled-in path to its components to be a fully qualified
- MS-Windows path name (although UNIX-style slashes are permitted, and
- preferred to the MS-Windows style backslashes, to demarcate the directory
- hierarchy). Thus, when configuring groff, if
- --prefix=<win32-install-path> is not correctly specified, then the
- installed groff application looks for its components in /usr/local, and
- most likely doesn't find them, because they are actually installed in
- <MSYS-install-path>/local.
- It is actually convenient, but by no means a requirement, to have groff
- installed in the /usr/local directory of the MSYS virtual file system; this
- makes it easy to invoke groff from the MSYS shell, since the virtual
- /usr/local/bin is normally added automatically to the PATH (the default
- PATH, as set in MSYS's /etc/profile), when MSYS is started.
- In order to install groff into MSYS's /usr/local directory, it is necessary
- to specify the fully qualified absolute MS-Windows path to this directory,
- when configuring groff, i.e.
- ./configure --prefix=<MSYS-install-path>/local ...
- For example, on a system where MSYS is installed in the MS-Windows directory
- D:\MSYS\1.0, the MSYS virtual path /usr/local resolves to the absolute
- MS-Windows native path D:\MSYS\1.0\local (the /usr component of the MSYS
- virtual path does not appear in the resolved absolute native path name since
- MSYS maps this directly to the root of the MSYS virtual file system). Thus,
- the --prefix option should be specified to configure as
- ./configure --prefix=D:/MSYS/1.0/local ...
- Note that the backslash characters, which appear in the native MS-Windows
- form of the path name, are replaced by UNIX-style slashes in the argument to
- configure; this is the preferred syntax.
- Also note that the MS-Windows device designator (D: in this instance) is
- prepended to the specified path, in the normal MS-Windows format, and that,
- since upper and lower case distinctions are ignored in MS-Windows path
- names, any combination of upper and lower case is acceptable.
- PREREQUISITES FOR HTML OUTPUT
- -----------------------------
- If you intend to use groff for production of HTML output, then there are a
- few dependencies which must be satisfied. Ideally, these should be resolved
- before attempting to configure and build groff, since the configuration
- script does check them.
- In order to produce HTML output, you first require a working implementation
- of Ghostscript; either the AFPL Ghostscript or the GNU Ghostscript
- implementation for MS-Windows should be suitable, depending on your
- licensing preference. It is highly recommended to use version 8.11 or
- higher due to bugs in older versions. These may be obtained, in the form of
- self-installing binary packages, by following the download links for the
- chosen licensing option, from http://sourceforge.net/projects/ghostscript.
- Please note that these packages install the Ghostscript interpreter required
- by groff in the ./bin subdirectory of the Ghostscript installation
- directory, with the name gswin32c.exe. However, groff expects this
- interpreter to be located in the system PATH, with the name gs.exe. Thus,
- to ensure that groff can correctly locate the Ghostscript interpreter, it is
- recommended that the file gswin32c.exe should be copied from the Ghostscript
- installation directory to the MSYS /usr/local/bin directory, where it should
- be renamed to gs.exe.
- In addition to a working Ghostscript interpreter, you also require several
- image manipulation utilities, all of which may be scavenged from various
- packages available from http://sourceforge.net/projects/gnuwin32, and which
- should be installed in the MSYS /usr/local/bin directory, or any other
- suitable directory which is specified in the PATH. These additional
- prerequisites are
- 1. from the netpbm-<version>-bin.zip package:
- netpbm.dll
- pnmcrop.exe
- pnmcut.exe
- pnmtopng.exe
- pnmtops.exe
- 2. from the libpng-<version>-bin.zip package:
- libpng.dll
- 3. from the zlib-<version>-bin.zip package:
- zlib-1.dll, which must be renamed to zlib.dll
- 4. from the psutils-<version>-bin.zip package:
- psselect.exe
- Note that it is not necessary to install the above four packages in their
- entirety; of course, you may do so if you wish.
- GROFF RUNTIME ENVIRONMENT
- -------------------------
- The runtime environment, provided to groff by MSYS, is essentially the same
- as would be provided under a UNIX or GNU/Linux operating system; thus, any
- environment variables which may be used to customize the groff runtime
- environment have similar effects under MSYS, as they would in UNIX or
- GNU/Linux, with the exception that any variable specifying a path should
- adopt the same syntax as a native MS-Windows PATH specification.
- There is, however, one known problem which is associated with the
- implementation of the MS-Windows file system, and the manner in which the
- Microsoft runtime library (which is used by the MinGW implementation of GCC)
- generates names for temporary files. This known problem arises when groff
- is invoked with a current working directory which refers to a network share,
- for which the user does not have write access in the root directory, and
- there is no environment variable set to define a writeable location for
- creating temporary files. When these conditions arise, groff fails with a
- `permission denied' error, as soon as it tries to create any temporary file.
- To specify the location for creating temporary files, the standard UNIX or
- GNU/Linux implementation of groff provides the GROFF_TMPDIR or TMPDIR
- environment variables, whereas MS-Windows applications generally use TMP or
- TEMP; furthermore, the MS-Windows implementations of Ghostscript apparently
- support the use of only TEMP or TMPDIR.
- To avoid problems with creation of temporary files, it is recommended that
- you ensure that both TMP and TEMP are defined, with identical values, to
- point to a suitable location for creating temporary files; many MS-Windows
- boxes have them set already, and groff has been adapted to honour them, when
- built in accordance with the preceding instructions, using MinGW.
- CAVEATS AND BUGS
- ----------------
- There are two known issues, observed when running groff in the MinGW/MSYS
- environment, which would not affect groff in its native UNIX environment:
- o Running groff with the working directory set to a subdirectory of a
- network share, where the user does not have write permission in the root
- directory of the share, causes groff to fail with a `permission denied'
- exception, if the TMP environment variable is not appropriately defined;
- it may also be necessary to define the TEMP environment variable, to avoid
- a similar failure mode, when using the -Thtml output mode of groff. This
- problem is more fully discussed in the preceding section, GROFF RUNTIME
- ENVIRONMENT.
- o When running groff (or nroff) to process standard input, where the
- standard input stream is obtained directly from the RXVT console provided
- with MSYS, groff cannot detect the end-of-file condition for the standard
- input stream, and hangs. This appears to be caused by a fault in the MSYS
- implementation of RXVT; it may be worked around by either starting MSYS
- without RXVT (see the comments in the MSYS.BAT startup script); in this
- case standard input is terminated by typing <Ctrl-Z> followed by <RETURN>,
- on a new input line. Alternatively, if you prefer to use MSYS with RXVT,
- you can enter the interactive groff command in the form
- cat | groff ...
- in which case <Ctrl-D> terminates the standard input stream, in just the
- same way it does on a UNIX system; the cat executable provided with MSYS
- does seem to trap the end-of-file condition, and properly signals groff
- that the input stream has terminated.