Building on Windows

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This page will collect useful information to develop GnuCash on Windows. If you were looking for tips regarding using GnuCash on Windows, you should read the Windows page instead.

Update January 2014

For some while the instructions in this wiki page have not 'just worked' to allow the building of a windows version of gnucash. This is mainly because the contents of the packaging/win32 directory have not kept pace with changes to the various dependencies and their repositories.

As of January 2014 there are updated versions of the necessary files which can be used successfully to build gnucash from scratch on Windows. These have not yet made it into the official repository, so there is some manual patching to be done. These instructions have been tested on Windows 7 (32 and 64 bit) against gnucash 2.6.0. Your mileage may vary.

Many thanks to Geert Janssens who did most of the necessary work.

Please note that even if you have an existing working mingw/msys environment, you are STRONGLY recommended to start again in an empty directory, and not to reuse what you have. The scripts are not clever about checking specific versions of already installed tools, and there are lots of subtle dependencies. By starting from scratch you will be using a combination of versions which has been tested together, rather than whatever happens to be the latest version in the mingw repository at the time you run.

Fortunately, mingw is happy to be installed multiple times in different directories on the same machine.

Let's get started.


In what follows, I will assume you are using the default c:\soft directory to contain everything.

1 Create c:\soft

2 I have put my patches on a convenient server I run. So you can download the file http://www.greenwheel.com/publicFiles/gnucash-windows-fixes.zip and unpack it into c:\soft\gnucash-windows-fixes

3 In that directory you will find, among other things, a file bootstrap_win_dev.vbs This is a visual basic script which will automate the first stage of the process, which consists of

  • obtaining the mingw/msys compilation environment which has the necessary tools to build on windows.
  • obtaining a working version of git and using it to
  • downloading the latest gnucash source code repository

If for some reason you are not using c:\soft, then please edit this script to check the various paths embedded therein and change appropriately.

Now run the script: cscript bootstrap_win_dev.vbs

If all goes well, you will have in c:\soft

  • an \mingw directory containing a very small part of mingw and msys ( just enough to get going )
  • a gnucash.git git repo containing the latest version of the gnucash source tree


4. Now, enter the msys environment by doing: 

cd c:\soft\mingw\msys\1.0
msys.bat

This should bring up an msys console which behaves like a cut down unix shell. The c:\soft directory is now called /c/soft 

cd /c/soft/gnucash.git

5. Now you need to patch the repository with the fixes required for Windows which haven't yet made it into the official build. So run 

patch -p4 </c/soft/gnucash-windows-fixes/repo.patch
cp /c/soft/gnucash-windows-fixes/*.patch ./packaging/win32

Note the -p4 in the patch command. This is needed to tell patch how to interpret the filenames inside the patch file

If you find that some or all of these patches fails, it may be because since these instructions were written, some or all of the changes have made it into the repo. In that case, hopefully, the README file in /c/soft/gnucash.git/packaging/win32 will tell you what's what.

6. Now 

cd /c/soft/gnucash.git/packaging/win32

You should have a quick check of the custom.sh file in packaging/win32 which was created by step 1, and edit anything you need to change ( probably nothing ). Then simply run 

./install.sh

or if you want to keep all the output 

./install.sh 2>&1 | tee install.out

and hope for the best.

If everything works, you will end up with /c/soft/gnucash/inst containing various subdirectories.

7. Finally, go to a normal windows command prompt ( not the msys prompt! ) and run 

c:\soft\gnucash\dist\bin\gnucash-launcher.cmd

and hope for the best......

8. NOTES - What do all these fixes do? The biggest change is that the new version of default.sh and install.sh know about the various dependency packages as of 2014 and not as they were some time earlier. As a result, they can actually find what they need. Most of these changes were done by Geert, but I had to make a few other changes:

- fix up the launcher script which is created by install_impl.sh to include some more directories

- deal with some errors in the default value of the relative repository directory


- add handling for more types of tar archive

- deal with an annoying problem with the guile package whereby various dlls have the wrong names for the corresponding .scm files. I don't know whether the underlying cause was a bug in guile or a problem with libtool, but since gnucash uses a rather old version of guile, I don't expect a proper fix any time soon.

- don't automatically delete the build directories in /c/soft/tmp which are created by install.sh. This makes it much easier to debug gnucash as the source to included libraries is still around. But it will cause problems if you upgrade some libraries, as install-impl.sh assumes there's only one version of any package in tmp at once, so before doing a new build, manually clear /c/soft/tmp out completely.

- there is a really silly problem with gwenhywfar - the current version 4.9.0beta thinks it's still 4.7.0. This doesn't cause problems on a first build. But subsequent builds will think it's not yet there, and rebuild it unnecessarily. I haven't fixed this as it's a nuisance rather than a big problem since normally once you have gnucash built for the first time, you won't run install again.

- guile compiled but didn't work properly. This was traced to a problem in guile configure not correctly checking for strncasecmp and then hitting a compiler bug when optimising is turned on. The fix is to add an explicit override for that test when running guile configure.

The main other change is that we needed to fix the configure.ac script to handle the fact that recent versions of the gnu compiler don't understand the -no-undefined flag and bomb out if they see it in LDFLAGS, which breaks a lot of the automatic tests. But that flag is needed in the various Makefiles, since otherwise libtool won't build shared libraries properly. So we defer adding -no-undefined to LDFLAGS until after configure has finished its tests, but before it writes out its instructions.

The only other change is a minor patch to the source tree in gnc-split-reg.h where we have to explicitly undefine a couple of preprocessor values such as DELETE and DUPLICATE which were set in an included header and interfere with the chosen values of an enumeration.

Finally, I note that we get an unrecognised flag during configure --enable-schemas-install

A bit of history

This page used to collect random notes from the time when we manually tried to install each and every part of the requirements. They have been moved to Windows/Old Notes.

Previous Instructions for an (almost) automated build

The instructions below are probably superseded by the new procedure above, but have been kept in for the moment, as if anything goes wrong, they may provide some clues.


These instructions explain how you can compile and run GnuCash on MS Windows by yourself. This is achieved by using the mingw32/gcc compiler environment. (If you want to use the Visual Studio compiler, see the sub-project Cutecash, but the instructions below must be followed first as well.)

We've created a shell script that will download, compile, and install all requirements of GnuCash on Windows and eventually GnuCash itself. Running this script will probably download ~200MB of data (but all downloaded data will be cached) and will take anything between 0.5 through 5 hours of time. That shell script is located in packaging/win32/install.sh of the gnucash Git sources.

Warning 
Windows XP or more recent is required for building Gnucash using install.sh (see below). Windows 2000 support was dropped starting from GnuCash 2.3.10, older versions of Windows are not supported.

Some notes upfront

  • In the following discussion, the c:\soft root folder should be replaced by whatever base folder you wish to work in. Avoid pathnames with spaces in them (so c:\Program Files is not good). Some parts of the build system don't cope well with that. If you choose a path other than c:\soft, be sure to set the GLOBAL_DIR parameter to this path in custom.sh later on (see below).
  • When installing packages in the script, it is strongly recommended that the expected locations are specified. Example: msys in c:\soft\msys.

Before you can execute this shell script (which will do everything else automatically), you have to complete these steps manually:

  • Download and install git for Windows. The preferred location to install it is $GLOBAL_DIR\git-1.7.10. If you install in another location, you will have to set GIT_DIR in custom.sh later on. The installer will add some git related items in the Windows Explorer context menus (you can access them via right-click in any directory)
  • Choose a spot where you want to store a copy of the GnuCash repository. The default path is $GLOBAL_DIR\gnucash\repos.
  • Create all directories in the path except the last one. For the example, make sure $GLOBAL_DIR\gnucash exists
  • Open a Windows explorer and go to $GLOBAL_DIR\gnucash (or your chosen location)
  • Right-click. In the popup select git bash. This will open a command prompt.
  • Go into the directory c:\soft\gnucash\packaging\win32.
  • Take a look at the comments at the top of defaults.sh and optionally create a file custom.sh to specify directories according to your preferences; the defaults would install everything in subdirectories below c:\soft. (Note that due to shell syntax, every windows-style backslash has to be specified as two backslashes.) Do not modify defaults.sh; make a custom.sh.
  • In here you may also specify GLOBAL_DIR, REPOS_DIR, GIT_DIR,... if you installed any of these in a non-standard directory.
  • Execute this downloaded package to install it into the chosen directory, say, C:\soft\msys (which is the $MSYS_DIR variable in defaults.sh, and is strongly recommended; be sure to override $MSYS_DIR in custom.sh if you put it somewhere else.) NB: That's not C:\soft\msys\1.0, just C: \soft\msys!
  • Start the MSYS commandline shell by double-clicking the "MSYS" icon on the desktop which should have been created when you installed the MSYS package.
  • Let the automated build begin by typing:
 $INSTALLER_DIR/install.sh   (the complete path to the install.sh)
 (e.g. /c/soft/packaging/win32/install.sh, or to save the log, 
 /c/soft/packaging/win32/install.sh 2>&1 | tee /c/soft/Build.txt)
  • If you get an error about the "tools" directory not existing, just make it (i.e. $GLOBAL_DIR\tools)
  • If you get an error about unzip not found, re-run install.sh. This is also usually the case about packages not found, after they have been installed.
  • Some of the downloaded packages are installed through graphical installer dialogs where you can choose an installation directory. In those cases, the install.sh script will tell you in the MSYS window the installation directory that you should choose, according to your settings in defaults.sh/custom.sh. Please enter only those installation directory in the installer dialog because otherwise the install.sh script cannot find the newly installed software.
  • If there haven't been any errors, you should be able (after several hours of compiling and installing) to start gnucash from the MSYS command line by typing
 c:/soft/gnucash/inst/bin/gnucash

or even without MSYS directly by "Start"-> "Run"-> "c:\soft\gnucash\inst\bin\gnucash.bat"

On Windows Vista Home Premium, open a windows command prompt, "cd \soft\gnucash\inst\bin" and then type "gnucash-launcher.cmd"

  • If you want to make a distribution executable, execute the following commands in MSYS, after executing install.sh described above.
 rm -rf /c/soft/gnucash/dist
 /c/soft/packaging/dist.sh
  • To start fresh with new package installs and cleaned out environment variables, after messing up the package installs, execute in MSYS, as for install.sh above, then restart your computer to eliminate environment variable problems such as with ACLOCAL:
 c:/soft/packaging/win32/reset.sh
  • To make modifications to your own source that is in
 c:/soft/gnucash/repos/src
  • When compiled from source, GnuCash will display in the default GTK Raleigh theme. The GnuCash binary installer defaults to the GTK-Wimp theme, which defers rendering of widgets to Windows for a native look-and-feel. Copy gtkrc from C:\soft\gnome\share\themes\MS-Windows\gtk-2.0 to C:\soft\gnome\etc\gtk-2.0 to change themes.


Please spread the word and report back any problems you encounter. It is probably not too difficult anymore to create a full self-contained package of GnuCash on Windows as well! Some more information is also collected here on this wiki page.

Working on Gnucash

Once you've successfully built Gnucash and all of its dependencies, it's a bit of a pain to re-run install.sh after every edit. To use make from the command prompt as usual, you need to set the following environment: 

export OLDPATH=$PATH

PATH=/c/soft/autotools/bin:$PATH
PATH=/c/soft/swig:$PATH
PATH=$PATH:/c/soft/active-perl/ActivePerl/perl/bin
PATH=$PATH:/c/soft/aqbanking/bin
PATH=$PATH:/c/soft/gwenhywfar/bin
PATH=$PATH:/c/soft/autotools/bin
PATH=$PATH:/c/soft/enchant/bin
PATH=$PATH:/c/soft/gmp/bin
PATH=$PATH:/c/soft/gnome/bin
PATH=$PATH:/c/soft/gnutls/bin
PATH=$PATH:/c/soft/goffice/bin
PATH=$PATH:/c/soft/guile/bin
PATH=$PATH:/c/soft/libdbi/bin
PATH=$PATH:/c/soft/libgsf/bin
PATH=$PATH:/c/soft/libofx/bin
PATH=$PATH:/c/soft/libsoup/bin
PATH=$PATH:/c/soft/libxslt/bin
PATH=$PATH:/c/soft/mysql/bin
PATH=$PATH:/c/soft/mysql/lib
PATH=$PATH:/c/soft/opensp/bin
PATH=$PATH:/c/soft/pcre/bin
PATH=$PATH:/c/soft/pgsql/bin
PATH=$PATH:/c/soft/pgsql/lib
PATH=$PATH:/c/soft/regex/bin
PATH=$PATH:/c/soft/sqlite3/bin
PATH=$PATH:/c/soft/webkit/bin

export PATH

export LTDL_LIBRARY_PATH=/c/soft/gnucash/inst/lib
export GNOME2_PATH=/c/soft/gnome
export INTLTOOL_PERL=/c/soft/active-perl/ActivePerl/perl/bin/perl
export GIT_CMD=/c/soft/git/git
export ACLOCAL_FLAGS="-I/c/soft/guile/share/aclocal -I/c/soft/gwenhywfar/share/aclocal -I/c/soft/aqbanking/share/aclocal -I/c/soft/autotools/share/aclocal -I/c/soft/gnome/share/aclocal -I/c/soft/gnutls/share/aclocal"

I put all of those commands into a file called devrc and then source it into my shell: 

. devrc

$OLDPATH is there so that you can reset the path easily: 

export PATH=$OLDPATH

The other piece of the puzzle is that you need to specify some environment to configure. Paste the following into a file (in your top-level source directory) -- I call mine .configure: 

./configure \
	    --prefix=/c/soft/gnucash-inst \
	    --enable-aqbanking \
	    --enable-ofx \
	    --enable-debug \
	    --enable-schemas-install=no \
	    --enable-dbi \
	    --with-dbi-dbd-dir=/c/soft/libdbi-drivers/lib/dbd \
	    --enable-binreloc \
	    --enable-locale-specific-tax \
	    CPPFLAGS="$CPPFLAGS -I/c/soft/autotools/include -I/c/soft/regex/include -I/c/soft/gnome/include -I/c/soft/guile/include -I/c/soft/libdbi/include -I/c/soft/gmp/include -I/c/soft/gwenhywfar/include -I/c/soft/libsoup/include -D_WIN32 -ggdb3 -Wall -Werror -fno-builtin-dgettext -fno-builtin-towupper -fno-builtin-iswlower" \
	     LDFLAGS="$LDFLAGS -L/c/soft/autotools/lib -L/c/soft/regex/lib -L/c/soft/gnome/lib -L/c/soft/guile/lib -L/c/soft/libdbi/lib -L/c/soft/gmp/lib -L/c/soft/gwenhywfar/lib -L/c/soft/libsoup/lib -L/c/soft/enchant/lib -L/c/soft/libxslt/lib -L/c/soft/sqlite3/lib" \
	       PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/c/soft/autotools/lib/pkgconfig:/c/soft/regex/lib/pkgconfig:/c/soft/gnome/lib/pkgconfig:/c/soft/guile/lib/pkgconfig:/c/soft/libdbi/lib/pkgconfig:/c/soft/gmp/lib/pkgconfig:/c/soft/gwenhywfar/lib/pkgconfig:/c/soft/libsoup/lib/pkgconfig:/c/soft/aqbanking/lib/pkgconfig:/c/soft/libofx/lib/pkgconfig:/c/soft/isocodes/lib/pkgconfig:/c/soft/libonoboui/lib/pkgconfig:/c/soft/libgsf/lib/pkgconfig:/c/soft/libxslt/lib/pkgconfig:/c/soft/webkit/lib/pkgconfig:/c/soft/enchant/lib/pkgconfig:/c/soft/gnutls/lib/pkgconfig:/c/soft/goffice/lib/pkgconfig

Then you call .configure instead of configure before you run make

Alternative way to develop on a Windows machine

You may also prefer to work on GnuCash in its native environment. An alternative approach to developing GnuCash on Windows could be to

Notes

Error messages, Trace file

When running into problems when running GnuCash, the trace file is usually your first stop to look for errors. You will find more details on this file here (Windows specific) and here (More generic).

Debugging with gdb

In addition to Stack Trace, here are a few instructions on how to run gnucash under gdb on Windows:

  • Install "gdb" from mingw.org [1]
  • GnuCash 2.2.9 and older
  • Modify the installed "bin\gnucash.cmd" script by inserting one and changing one line. It should end like
    set PATH=C:\Program Files\gdb\bin;%PATH%
    start gdb --args gnucash-bin %*
Be careful to use the actual paths in which you have installed gdb.exe
  • Then start gnucash as usual
  • GnuCash 2.4.0 and more recent
  • Open a Windows command prompt and type:
    set PATH=C:\Program Files\gdb\bin;%PATH%
    gdb "C:\Program Files\gnucash\bin\gnucash"
Be careful to use the actual paths in which you have installed gdb and gnucash respectively.
  • For all versions: this will open a gdb prompt
  • Type run at the gdb prompt.
  • Then provoke the crash and type backtrace or shorthand bt at the gdb prompt to obtain the backtrace, as explained on Stack Trace as well.

(2.2.9 and older only)If you are working in a MinGW shell, you may want to change and call the bin\gnucash script instead and use exec start gdb --args gnucash-bin "$@" to make Ctrl-C actually work.

If you build gnucash with the help of install.sh, make sure you export DISABLE_OPTIMIZATIONS=yes in packaging/win32/custom.sh to include debugging symbols and avoid optimizations that complicate debugging.

You can provide even better stack traces if you tell gdb where in memory dynamically loaded modules got mapped to, because otherwise function calls into those are only written as '??'. See here and here for a way to do this.

To enter [ and ], use set editing off.

install.sh

  • To debug install.sh, change set -e to set -ex at the top of it.

Console output and exetype

All executables and DLLs on Windows operate in one of a few different subsystems, most of them either in Console or GUI (also called Windows). Basically, executables in Console always start up in a new console window and print output for stdout und stderr to it, whereas ones in GUI do not open windows and are pretty quiet, even in console windows. If you want to change that subsystem type, because you want to see debugging output or hide unnecessary console windows, [2] lists a few possible ways.

The easiest option if you don't have any further build tools available is probably the third one from that mail: Install the MSYS program (needed for building GnuCash) from the pointer at the top section of this page, fetch http://svn.gnucash.org/trac/browser/gnucash/trunk/packaging/win32/exetype.pl and type 

exetype.pl gnucash-bin.exe console

If you are building gnucash with install.sh, you might want to automate this step. To do so, just add the following lines to the function make_install in your local install.sh (after "make install"): 

   qpushd $_INSTALL_UDIR/bin
   	exetype gnucash-bin.exe console
   qpopd

Problems, issues, comments

After spending 3-4 hours with after creating 35,074 files I got an error like that:

100%[======================================>] 3,509,072 59.9K/s in 33s

2014-01-10 14:26:40 (104 KB/s) - `/c/soft/tmp/htmlhelp.exe' saved [3509072/35090 72]

!!! When asked for an installation path, specify c:\soft\hh !!! ./install-impl.sh: line 1244: /c/soft/downloads/htmlhelp.exe: Bad file number


DLL install error

I get an error like that: 

'libgncmodule.la' 'c:/soft/gnucash/lib/libgncmodule.la'
/bin/install -c .libs/libgncmodule.dll.a
c:/soft/gnucash/lib/libgncmodule.dll.a
base_file=`basename ${file}`
  dlpath=`/bin/sh 2>&1 -c '. .libs/'${base_file}'i;echo $dlname'`
make[5]: *** [install-libLTLIBRARIES] Error 1
make[5]: Leaving directory `/c/soft/repos/src/gnc-module'
make[4]: *** [install-am] Error 2

This seems to be only an installation problem. Fine compiling it seems.

I saw this at "make install" when I stopped and restarted the preceding compiling several times. So to me this looks like an artifact of DLLs that somehow "don't fit" to each other. The solution was always to run "make clean" in the source directory so that all DLLs are being deleted, and then starting the compiling again. --Cstim 05:55, 4 December 2006 (EST)

I still see this error frequently, even when I completely remove the build/ directory and let it be created from scratch. (?!?) As an alternative, I've now tried a newer libtool version by installing the cvs snapshot libtool-1.5.23a from http://www.gnu.org/software/libtool/ . Maybe the newer version has this bug fixed. --Cstim 10:27, 22 January 2007 (EST)

Seems like using libtool-1.5.23a didn't change a thing. I've written a script that should track down potential errors:
#!/bin/sh
ALL_LIBDIR=` find . -name '*.la' | grep '\.libs' `
RM_THESE=""

for LIB in $ALL_LIBDIR ; do
    DIR=`dirname ${LIB}`
    FNAME=`basename ${LIB}`
    LIBBASE=`basename ${LIB} .la`
    if test ! -f "${LIB}i" -a -f "${DIR}/${LIBBASE}.dll.a" ; then
	echo "File ${LIB}i missing"
	PDIR=`dirname ${DIR}`
	#echo "Do this: rm ${PDIR}/${FNAME}"
	RM_THESE="${RM_THESE} ${PDIR}/${FNAME}"
    fi
done

if test "x${RM_THESE}" != "x"; then
    echo "Do this:"
    echo "rm ${RM_THESE}"
fi

So how is someone supposed to use the above script? It says it is supposed to track down potential errors, since it is doing some erasing (rm) does that mean it is fixing the problems as well? Or at least fixing it such that running install.sh again should work?

I have now run make clean && make all install in a particular directory 3 times but still get the same error.

Missing file after extracting Open SSL on Windows XP Pro

Note I have never run into this issue since I started to work with the Windows build (somewhere in the 2.3.x period). So it may no longer be relevant. There is however no date or version information in the message, so I'll keep it around for now. It may move to the History section at some point. --GJanssens 18 October 2013

This is the error that I got: 

3200K .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... 99%  145.77 KB/s
3250K .......... ...                                        100%  834.05 KB/s


20:36:43 (145.65 KB/s) - `c:/soft/tmp/openssl-0.9.8e.tar.gz' saved [3341665/3341665]


Extracting openssl-0.9.8e.tar.gz ... done
The system cannot find the path specified.

This is the first error that I got. Everything was fine up to this point.

When I turn on set -ex, I get the following: 

++ cp e_os.h e_os2.h include/openssl
+++ unix_path 'C:\WINDOWS\system32\cmd.exe'
+++ echo 'C:\WINDOWS\system32\cmd.exe'
+++ sed 's,^\([A-Za-z]\):,/\1,;s,\\,/,g'
++ _COMSPEC_U=/C/WINDOWS/system32/cmd.exe
++ PATH=/c/soft/active-perl/ActivePerl/Perl/bin:/c/soft/mingw/bin
++ /C/WINDOWS/system32/cmd.exe //c 'ms\mingw32'
The system cannot find the path specified.
Does that mean that your system lacks C:\Windows\System32\cmd.exe, $TMP_DIR\openssl-0.9.8e\ms\mingw32.bat or what do you think?

C:\Windows\System32\cmd.exe is definitely there.
So is C:\soft\tmp\openssl-0.9.8e\ms\mingw32.bat.

If I hardcode the full path to mingw32 in install.sh like this: 

 PATH=$_ACTIVE_PERL_UDIR/ActivePerl/Perl/bin:$_MINGW_UDIR/bin $_COMSPEC_U //c c:\\soft\\tmp\\openssl-0.9.8e\\ms\\mingw32

ming32.bat starts to execute but it generates its own set of errors: 

 > perl Configure mingw         
 Can't open perl script "Configure": No such file or directory
 Generating x86 for GNU assember
 Bignum
 The system cannot find the path specified.
 Can't open perl script "bn-586.pl": No such file or directory
 Can't open perl script "co-586.pl": No such file or directory
 DES . . .

So to get beyond that problem, I modified mingw32.bat to start out with a cd command, since it was starting in the C:\ directory: 

 cd C:\soft\tmp\openssl-0.9.8e
 perl Configure mingw %1 %2 %3 %4 %5 %6 %7 %8
 @echo off

which allowed it to run a bit further and generated this error: 

 Generating x86 for GNU assember
 Bignum
 DES
 crypt
 Blowfish
 CAST5
 RC4
 MD5
 SHA1
 RIPEMD160
 RC5\32
 CPUID
 Generating makefile
 Generating DLL definition files
 Building the libraries
 Building OpenSSL
 mingw32-make: *** [banner] Error 1

I don't think I should keep making these minor adjustments to install.sh and mingw32.bat. There must be something I've done wrong that is causing this problem to appear in the first place.

--FELap09

I am sorry, I do not really know how to help you other than "delete c:\soft\tmp\openssl-*, c:\soft\openssl and retry with -ex". -- andi5
I had a similar problem compiling OpenSSL. It was fixed by uninstalling mingw from its custom location, then allowing the install.sh script to reinstall it. -- cedayiv

Logitech QuickCam conflicts

Some Logitech QuickCam software is incompatible with MSYS, and causes the install.sh script to randomly crash and create sh.exe.stackdump files. If you experience this problem, see the MSYS FAQ page or the MinGW mailing list for help.


Older information, mainly for reference

Guile 1.8

The following is obsolete: The build scripts for 2.4 and trunk correctly build Guile 1.8. The notes are retained for historical interest.

GnuCash/Windows currently uses guile 1.6.x. Guile's development continues and the use of this old, no longer supported version of guile is blocking some improvements. Recent examples of this were:

  • Guile 1.8.7 removed some deprecated functions. However, the replacement functions were not available in 1.6.x. Because of this, GnuCash has to carry a compatibility header. We were lucky to get away with that.
  • Andy Wingo provided patches to make GnuCash work with the upcoming guile 2.0 and to remove our dependency on slib. These patches are incompatible with guile 1.6.x (and likely will always be), so they couldn't all be applied.

I have been attempting for some time to build a more recent version of guile but this turns out to be rather difficult. At the time of this writing, I have a working guile, save it won't load slib. There were many small things I had to do to get to this point. In order not to forget them, I've chosen to document them here.

Getting it to build

The 1.8.7 tarball you can download from guile's homepage won't build in our GnuCash mingw/MSYS environment.

  • First error is that our version of automake is too old. Guile requires 1.11, GnuCash still builds with 1.10 at the time of this writing. Luckily, this can easily be fixed by updating the version in defaults.sh and rebuilding the autotools/libtool packages.
  • Guile 1.8.7 no longer contains its own libltdl implementation. This is provided with libtool though. All it required to fix this was to add the proper paths to CPPFLAGS and LDFLAGS.
  • Also new is that guile now requires gmp. Another addition to CPPFLAGS and LDFLAGS solves this.
  • Next is libintl. GnuCash builds this as part of the Gnome packages. However, we pull in the gnome libraries after we build guile. This doesn't work. So the build script has to be modified to first do the gnome install and then build guile.
  • Guile 1.8.7 still recognizes the configure time option --disable-networking, yet it won't build on Windows if this option is set. So this option should be removed from the build script.
  • Next, all kinds of unresolved symbol errors pop up. To fix most of them, I looked at the source package of MSYS-guile-1.8.7. They apparently managed to build guile, so it provided a good starting point. I can't use their patches verbatim, because that would result in a guile package that depends on the MSYS environment. Their patch for config.in was very useful though. To build build with this patch, the configure script has to be rebuilt, using autoreconf. This in itself was a bit of a quest. It wouldn't work unless I redefined ACLOCAL and passed autoreconf a number of library paths.
  • I also learned from the MSYS-guile project that guile should be built with "-Wl,enable-auto-import" to avoid a number of linker warnings (which are treated as errors in our build process).
That was about all to get the library and executable to build. But then it really gets ugly. The next part of the guile build process uses the freshly compiled executable to setup other required bits. This fails miserably with a rather cryptic error 
ERROR: In procedure scm_i_lreadparen: #<unknown port>:1:7: end of file
.

It took me quite a while to grasp this one. I found several threads on different mailing lists about the error, which where more or less helpful:

Result: the guile build process completes, and the guile binary works - provided it can find all of its library dependencies of course. 

guile -c '(use-modules (srfi srfi-39))'
runs with no problems.

slib

This is still problematic at this point. 

guile -c "(use-modules (ice-9 slib)) (require 'printf)"
results in this error:

ERROR: In procedure open-file: ERROR: No such file or directory: "C:/GCDevel/guile/share/guile/1.8/slib/C:/GCDevel/guile/share/guile/1.8/slib/require" ABORT: (system error)</pre>

Obviously there's something wrong with the path guile uses to find the file require.scm.

I'm still investigating what happens here.

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