Compiling Old Versions of GNU Make for Windows

Posted in Retro Computers, Software

I needed to build GNU Make v3.8 for Windows, turns out that this is not straightforward and I needed to patch the build script to get it to correctly build. GNU Make 3.8 is a very old version of make, the release note dates back to 2002.

The first issue is it needs an old version of Visual C++, trying to build using VS 2019 you will get a lot of warnings about deprecated flags. Reading the README.W32 file it mentions MSVC 5.x and MSVC 6.x. I opted for MSVC 6 which I happened to have a copy of in a Windows 2000 VM.

The first issue we need to resolve is a linking error caused by a missing library.

Looking through the build output we can see that it cannot find "config.h", which prevents the "subproc.lib" library from compiling which subsequently causes the error we just saw.

C:\BUILD\xxx\make-3.80\w32\subproc>cl.exe /nologo /MT /W3 /GX /Z7 /YX /Od /I .. /I . /I ../include /I ../.. /D WIN32 /D
WINDOWS32 /D _DEBUG /D _WINDOWS /FR.\WinDebug/ /Fp.\WinDebug/subproc.pch /Fo.\WinDebug/ /c sub_proc.c
sub_proc.c
sub_proc.c(9) : fatal error C1083: Cannot open include file: 'config.h': No such file or directory

The reason that "config.h" does not exist is that the file is not created by the build script. The line in the build script that creates it doesn’t get run, this is because there is a “+” at the beginning of the line which stops this line from running.

set make=gnumake
+if not exist config.h copy config.h.W32 config.h
cd w32\subproc

Removing the plus at the beginning of the line allows "subproc.lib" to be compiled and linked, but we still get linker errors. 

C:\BUILD\xxx\make-3.80>echo WinRel\pathstuff.obj  1>>link.rel

C:\BUILD\xxx\make-3.80>echo off
"Linking WinRel/gnumake.exe"
function.obj : error LNK2001: unresolved external symbol _hash_init
variable.obj : error LNK2001: unresolved external symbol _hash_init
file.obj : error LNK2001: unresolved external symbol _hash_init
dir.obj : error LNK2001: unresolved external symbol _hash_init
read.obj : error LNK2001: unresolved external symbol _hash_init
variable.obj : error LNK2001: unresolved external symbol _hash_insert_at
file.obj : error LNK2001: unresolved external symbol _hash_insert_at
dir.obj : error LNK2001: unresolved external symbol _hash_insert_at
read.obj : error LNK2001: unresolved external symbol _hash_insert_at
variable.obj : error LNK2001: unresolved external symbol _hash_deleted_item
file.obj : error LNK2001: unresolved external symbol _hash_deleted_item
dir.obj : error LNK2001: unresolved external symbol _hash_deleted_item
read.obj : error LNK2001: unresolved external symbol _hash_deleted_item
variable.obj : error LNK2001: unresolved external symbol _hash_find_slot
file.obj : error LNK2001: unresolved external symbol _hash_find_slot
dir.obj : error LNK2001: unresolved external symbol _hash_find_slot
read.obj : error LNK2001: unresolved external symbol _hash_find_slot
variable.obj : error LNK2001: unresolved external symbol _hash_find_item
file.obj : error LNK2001: unresolved external symbol _hash_find_item
dir.obj : error LNK2001: unresolved external symbol _hash_find_item
function.obj : error LNK2001: unresolved external symbol _hash_find_item
variable.obj : error LNK2001: unresolved external symbol _hash_free
read.obj : error LNK2001: unresolved external symbol _hash_free
function.obj : error LNK2001: unresolved external symbol _hash_free
variable.obj : error LNK2001: unresolved external symbol _hash_map
file.obj : error LNK2001: unresolved external symbol _hash_map
variable.obj : error LNK2001: unresolved external symbol _hash_delete
file.obj : error LNK2001: unresolved external symbol _hash_delete
variable.obj : error LNK2001: unresolved external symbol _hash_print_stats
file.obj : error LNK2001: unresolved external symbol _hash_print_stats
variable.obj : error LNK2001: unresolved external symbol _hash_map_arg
file.obj : error LNK2001: unresolved external symbol _hash_dump
dir.obj : error LNK2001: unresolved external symbol _hash_insert
function.obj : error LNK2001: unresolved external symbol _hash_insert
function.obj : error LNK2001: unresolved external symbol _hash_load
.\WinRel/gnumake.exe : fatal error LNK1120: 13 unresolved externals
"WinRel build failed"

C:\BUILD\xxx\make-3.80>

There’s a lot of unresolved symbols, I searched for "hash_insert_at" and found the definition for it in "hash.c". Looking through the build script it turns out that this file is not included in the build. I added the following two lines to "build_w32.bat" just after "implicit.c" is compiled.

cl.exe /nologo /MT /W3 /GX /YX /O2 /I . /I glob /I w32/include /D NDEBUG /D WINDOWS32 /D WIN32 /D _CONSOLE /D HAVE_CONFIG_H /FR.\WinRel/ /Fp.\WinRel/%make%.pch /Fo.\WinRel/ /c hash.c
echo WinRel\hash.obj >>link.rel

Running the build script again, and voilà…..

C:\BUILD\build\make-3.80>echo off
"Linking WinRel/gnumake.exe"
LINK : warning LNK4089: all references to "ADVAPI32.dll" discarded by /OPT:REF
"WinRel build succeeded!"

C:\BUILD\build\make-3.80>

YAY!!! It now compiles, and we have gnumake.exe.