Building XZ Utils on Windows ============================ Introduction ------------ This document explains shortly where to get and how to install the build tool that are needed to build XZ Utils on Windows. The final binary package will be standalone in sense that it will depend only on DLLs that are included in all Windows installations. These instructions don't apply to Cygwin. XZ Utils can be built under Cygwin in the same way as many other packages. These instructions don't apply to MinGW and MSYS developers either, who may want to package XZ Utils for MinGW or MSYS distributions. You know who you are, and will probably use quite different configure options etc. than what is described here. Installing the toolchain(s) --------------------------- Some of the following is needed: - MSYS is always needed to use the GNU Autotools based build system. - MinGW builds 32-bit x86 binaries. - MingW-w32 builds 32-bit x86 executables too. - MinGW-w64 builds 64-bit x86-64 binaries. So you need to pick between MinGW and MinGW-w32 when building 32-bit version. You don't need both. You might find 7-Zip handy when extracting some files (especially the .tar.lzma files). The ready-made build script will also use 7-Zip to create the distributable .zip and .7z files. I used the following directory structure but you can use whatever you want. Just note that I will use these in my examples. Each of these should have a subdirectory "bin": C:\devel\tools\msys C:\devel\tools\mingw C:\devel\tools\mingw-w32 C:\devel\tools\mingw-w64 Installing MSYS You can download MSYS from MinGW's Sourceforge page: http://sourceforge.net/projects/mingw/files/ It's under "MSYS Base System". I recommend using MSYS 1.0.11 (MSYS-1.0.11.exe or msysCORE-1.0.11-bin.tar.gz) because that package includes all the required tools. At least some of the later versions include only a subset and thus you would need to download the rest separately. The old version will work fine for building XZ Utils. You can use either the .exe or .tar.gz package. I prefer .tar.gz, because it can be extracted into any directory and later removed without worrying about uninstallers. Installing MinGW You can download the required packages from MinGW's Sourceforge page: http://sourceforge.net/projects/mingw/files/ These version numbers were the latest when I wrote this document, but you probably should pick the latest versions: MinGW Runtime -> mingwrt-3.17-mingw32-dev.tar.gz MinGW API for MS-Windows -> w32api-3.14-mingw32-dev.tar.gz GNU Binutils -> binutils-2.20-1-bin.tar.gz GCC Version 4 -> gcc-full-4.4.0-mingw32-bin-2.tar.lzma The full GCC package is quite big, but if you want a smaller download, you will need to download more than one file, so I'm using the full package in this document for simplicity. Extract the packages in the above order, possibly overwriting files from packages that were extracted earlier. Installing MinGW-w32 or MinGW-w64 You can find the latest MinGW-w32 and MinGW-w64 builds here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/mingw-w64/files/ Locate the appropriate files: Toolchains targeting Win32 -> mingw-w32-*-mingw*.zip Toolchains targeting Win64 -> mingw-w64-*-mingw*.zip I don't know what is the most recommended one. I used sezero's versions from "Personal Builds", since they seemed to have a stable GCC (judging from the GCC version number only). If you will install both MinGW-w32 and MinGW-w64, remember to extract them into different directories. Building XZ Utils ----------------- Start MSYS by going to the directory C:\devel\tools\msys and running msys.bat there (double-click or use command prompt). It will start at "home" directory, which is C:\devel\tools\msys\home\YourUserName. If you have xz-5.x.x.tar.gz in C:\devel, you should be able to build it now with the following commands: cd /c/devel tar xzf xz-5.x.x.tar.gz cd xz-5.x.x bash windows/build.bash If you used some other directory than C:\devel\tools for the build tools, edit the variables near the beginning of build.bash first. If you want to build manually, read the buildit() function in build.bash. Look especially at the latter configure invocation. Be patient. Running configure and other scripts used by the build system is (very) slow under Windows.