-*- Mode: text; fill-column: 70 -*- omake is designed to build itself. Of course you must be wondering how we build in the first place! If you already have a working copy of omake (for instance, by downloading and installing it from somewhere else like omake.metaprl.org), then you should use your working copy to do the bootstrap. Otherwise, let's assume you do don't have omake already installed and you want to build it. -- Bootstrapping -- Bootstrapping is setup to use "make" or "nmake". By using one of these other tools, you can build a limited byte-code version of omake that you can then use to complete the install. NOTE: The bootstrap uses the file src/Makefile and src/Makefile.nt with default options, like CC=cc. If something goes wrong, you can edit these files by hand to suit your taste. However, the src/Makefiles are generated, and they will be clobbered when you run omake for the first time. To be safe, if you decide to modify them, save your changes in some safe place, not /tmp. -- Unix, MacOS X, Cygwin bootstrap -- You can use "make" to build a bootstrap version of omake. Run % make boot to build the omake-boot executable. This should work with classic make; there should be no need to use GNU make. If you have it, GNU make will work fine. If you are going to compile OMake with the default options, you can use make to both bootstrap and build omake: % make all or even bootstrap, build, and install it: % make install Environment variables: - PREFIX (make all, make install) specifies the prefix for OMake installation (defaults to /usr/local) - INSTALL_ROOT (make install) specifies a "packaging root" for the installation. Namely, omake will be installed under $INSTALL_ROOT$PREFIX, but the omake binary will be compiled to look for its files under $PREFIX. -- Win32 bootstrap -- The native Win32 build is faster than a Cygwin executable; it is recommended. However, no matter what you do, execution times on Win32 will be substantially longer than on Unix (I'm not sure why; I'm guessing that Win32 is a pig). NOTE: Note that if you call any native executable from a Cygwin shell, and you signal it (for example, with control-C), Cygwin immediately terminates the process. This is a well-known problem with Cygwin. It also means that when you abort omake from a Cygwin shell, it will not have a chance to save its work. Next time you run omake, it will have forgotten everything it did before you aborted it. Please complain to the Cygwin people at www.cygwin.com if you would like this to change. Please be nice. They already know about this issue. One way to avoid this problem is to run omake from a dos-prompt. You can also run osh in a console window if you want a usable shell. For a native Win32 build, you will need the native Win32 version of OCaml, Visual C++, and the Microsoft macro assembler. See www.ocaml.org if you want to know where to get the macro assembler "ml". It once came with Visual C++, but as far as I know, this is no longer true. "nmake" is Microsoft's attempt at a build tool. It is part of Visual C++. To run it, use the following command from a dos prompt. dos> nmake -f Makefile.nt boot This will build the omake-boot executable, which you can use to finish the installation. -- Finishing the install -- Let's assume that you have successfully created the omake-boot executable. To complete the install, run % ./omake-boot or dos> omake-boot After some configuration message, you should now get a message telling you that a .config file was just created, and you should edit it. You should either edit the .config, or leave it like it is. The defaults should be pretty reasonable for your machine, but take a look if you are curious. When you are ready, run omake-boot again to build the real version of omake. If you like, you can run % ./omake-boot install or dos> omake-boot install to install it. At this point, you are done. NOTE: You can continue to use omake-boot for building omake, but you are probably better off using an installed version, or src/main/omake. This is mainly for Win32, where the byte-code omake-boot is not nearly as fast as the native-code src/main/omake.