Executive Summary
=================

Maxima can be simply compiled and installed under MSYS or Cygwin by
following the instructions in INSTALL. With a few more steps, Maxima
will create a windows installer executable. The instructions for doing
so are contained in this file. Note, however, that this process is not
as polished as the unix-like install process.

In principle, creating a Windows (X)maxima installer executable is a
straightforward exercise. In order to create the maxima windows
installer from the maxima tarball distribution, I do the following in
a msys window:
-----------------------------
./configure  --with-wish=wish83 --prefix=c:/msys/1.0/maxinstall
make
make install
make iss
-----------------------------
I then run InnoSetup on the generated maxima.iss file. That is all it
takes.


External Requirements
=====================

1) MSYS+MinGW
2) GCL
3) Tcl/SK
4) Perl
5) Starkit sdk, et. al.
6) InnoSetup

Detailed Instructions
=====================

I am posting my notes here in hopes that they will be corrected
by people who know better. I don't know much about windows (and it
shows.) Also, I am reconstructing these steps from memory, so I may be
leaving out steps.

1) Get a working msys+mingw installation from www.mingw.org.
   a) Follow the links to
   http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=2435
   Get MinGW 2.0.0-3.exe. I installed it in c:\MinGW
   b) From the same page, get msys Snapshot 1.0.8. I installed it in
   c:\msys\1.0. The installer should magically find your mingw
   installation and add it to your path.

2) Get a working GCL using either (2a) or (2b):

2a) Get GCL 2.5.0 snapshot binary from
http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/gcl/. Follow the links to
ftp://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/gcl/cvs/. I installed it in c:\gcl.

Edit the paths in the gcl wrapper script (c:\gcl\bin\gcl) to reflect
the installation directory. Pay careful attention to the format of the
path descriptions (g:/gclm vs. /g/gclm). If you change the format of
the paths, you will get strange errors when you try to run
gcl. Unfortunately, recent binaries (as of Feb 4, 2003) have crashed
for me during maxima compiles and/or checks.

2b) Get a GCL 2.5.0 tarball. The recent CVS versions of GCL have also
crashed for me. I am currently using a CVS snapshot from approximately
January 3, 2003. Follow the cvs instructions at
http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/gcl/ to check out GCL. The cvs
command to check out the version from January 3 is

cvs -d :pserver:anoncvs@subversions.gnu.org:/cvsroot/gcl checkout -D
"2003-01-03" gcl

I leave getting a cvs checkout on a windows machine as an exercise for
the reader. Personally, I check it out under Linux, then tar up the
results and copy them to my windows partition.

Once the gcl sources are available, compile it with

./configure  --prefix=c:/gcl
make
make install

For extra portability, I do, instead,

./configure --prefix=c:/gcl
cs gmp3
./configure --build=i486-unknown-linux-gnu
cd ..
make
make install

3) Get Tcl/Tk 8.3 from
http://members1.chello.nl/~j.nijtmans/mingw.html. I installed it in
c:\tcltk.

4) Get and install ActivePerl from http://www.activestate.com.

5) Get and install TclKit and Starkit sdx from
http://www.equi4.com. Frankly, I found this step confusing. Although
Starkit are very simply to use, it took me quite a while to understand
what needed to be download, installed etc. In the end, I have the
following files installed in c:\star
	sdx.bat  sdx.kit  tclkit.exe  tclkitsh.exe

6) Get and install Inno Setup from http://www.jrsoftware.org/isinfo.php.

7) Edit your MSYS startup paths in c:\msys\1.0\etc\profile to put gcl,
tcltk and tclkitsh in your PATH. I did so by adding the following line
after the initial setting of PATH:
        export PATH="/c/gcl/bin:/c/tcltk/bin:/c/star:$PATH"

8) You should now be ready to compile and install maxima. configure
maxima so that it will install in some sort of temporary
directory. The directory does not need to exist ahead of time.

./configure  --with-wish=wish83 --prefix=c:/msys/1.0/maxinstall
make
make check
make install

The "check" should pass all tests except those listed as known
failures.

9) The next step depends on the install locations of TCL/TK, sdx,
tclkit, tclkitsh and gcc. The system for determining these locations
is not as elegant as autoconf (configure). Instead, the system
defaults to the directories on my build machine. However, all the
defaults are override-able on the make command line. If you have all
the files installed in the (my) default locations, the next step is
simply

make iss

If, for example, you have sdx installed in d:\other\starkit, you would
type

make iss SDXDIR=/d/other/starkit

The override-able variables and their defaults are:

TCLKITSH = tclkitsh.exe
TCLKITDIR = /c/star
SDXDIR = $(TCLKITDIR)
TCLTKDIR = /c/tcltk
TCLTKINCFLAGS = -I $(TCLTKDIR)/include
TCLTKLINKFLAGS = -L $(TCLTKDIR)/lib
GCCPREFIX=/mingw

To see how they are used, look in interfaces/xmaxima/win32/Makefile.in
and Makefile.am in the top level maxima directory.

10) Once "make iss" is complete, run Inno Setup on the maxima.iss
file. I recommend completely removing the temporary maxima install
directory (c:/msys/1.0/maxinstall above) before testing the
installation.

 LocalWords:  iss Tcl mingw gmp linux