Tcl 8.5 for Windows RCS: @(#) $Id: README,v 1.33 2005/07/23 02:59:59 mdejong Exp $ 1. Introduction --------------- This is the directory where you configure and compile the Windows version of Tcl. This directory also contains source files for Tcl that are specific to Microsoft Windows. The information in this file is maintained on the web at: http://www.tcl.tk/doc/howto/compile.html#win The above URL includes a lengthy discussion of compiler macros necessary when compiling Tcl extensions that will be dynamically loaded. 2. Compiling Tcl ---------------- In order to compile Tcl for Windows, you need the following: Tcl 8.5 Source Distribution (plus any patches) and Visual C++ 5 or newer or Msys + Mingw http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/tcl/msys_mingw7.zip This Msys + Mingw download is the minimal environment needed to build Tcl/Tk under Windows. It includes a shell environment and gcc. The release is designed to make it as easy a possible to build Tcl/Tk. To install, you just download the zip file and extract the files into a directory. The README.TXT file describes how to launch the msys shell, you then run the configure script in the tcl/win directory. In practice, this release is built with Visual C++ 6.0 and the TEA Makefile. If you are building with Visual C++, in the "win" subdirectory of the source release, you will find "makefile.vc". This is the makefile for the Visual C++ compiler and uses the stock NMAKE tool. Detailed directions for using it, are in the comments of "makefile.vc". A quick example would be: C:\tcl_source\win\>nmake -f makefile.vc There is also a Developer Studio workspace and project file, too, if you would like to use them. If you are building with Msys or Cygwin, you can use the configure script that lives in the win subdirectory. The Msys or Cygwin based configure/build process works just like the UNIX one, so you will want to refer to ../unix/README for available configure options. An error will be generated by the configure script if you try to compile Tcl with the Cygwin version of gcc instead of the Mingw version. Check your PATH if you get this error. Be aware that gcc will generate lots of compile time warnings when building Tcl. Warnings are not errors, so please don't file a bug report about them. In order to use the binaries generated by these makefiles, you will need to place the Tcl script library files someplace where Tcl can find them. Tcl looks in one of following places for the library files: 1) The path specified in the environment variable "TCL_LIBRARY". 2) Relative to the directory containing the current .exe. Tcl will look for a directory "..\lib\tcl8.5" relative to the directory containing the currently running .exe. Note that in order to run tclsh85.exe, you must ensure that tcl85.dll and tclpip85.dll are on your path, in the system directory, or in the directory containing tclsh84.exe. Note: Tcl no longer provides support for Win32s. 3. Test suite ------------- This distribution contains an extensive test suite for Tcl. Some of the tests are timing dependent and will fail from time to time. If a test is failing consistently, please send us a bug report with as much detail as you can manage. Please use the online database at http://tcl.sourceforge.net/ In order to run the test suite, you build the "test" target using the appropriate makefile for your compiler.