Windows

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GnuCash on Microsoft Windows

This page collects various notes about potentially compiling GnuCash on Microsoft Windows.

FAQ: Is it possible to compile GnuCash on Windows? A: Currently, no. However, with the 1.9.x/2.0.0 series now being released, gnucash is fully based on gtk2. This means it will probably be rather easy to finish a full windows port. "The other big application" Gnumeric already showed how to do it. Their UI code relies solely on gtk-2.0 (or 2.2 or whatever), i.e. they replaced every dependency on libgnomeui by its gtk equivalent. And gtk-2.2 is fully available on windows. Obviously they managed to do this somehow, so I suspect it shouldn't be too difficult to do the same with gnucash. Also, one of our smaller competitors, Grisbi http://sourceforge.net/projects/grisbi , is offering a windows port by this very same strategy.

Relevant recent gnucash-devel discussion:

Status: It is possible to compile all prerequisites successfully. It remains an open question how to approach the full gnucash package. --Cstim 07:55, 3 March 2006 (EST)

Prerequisites

Mingw32

See http://www.mingw.org . All available as pre-compiled binaries.

Many other pre-compiled binaries are also available from http://gnuwin32.sf.net/ . (All gtk-related packages like pkgconfig and libxml2, however, are already included in the large glade package, see below.)

SVN

There are multiple SVN clients for windows. The command-line program is in the http://subversion.tigris.org package. A GUI client that installs as a plugin to the Windows Explorer is on http://tortoisesvn.tigris.org .

guile

In guile-1.6.7 several tweaks were necessary to get it to compile.

  • File libguile/fports.c line 479: replace "#elif defined(FIONREAD)" by "#elif 0"
  • File libguile-ltdl/raw-ltdl.c lines 220, 222, 224: remove the LT_GLOBAL_DATA macro on each line. You might need to touch libguile-ltdl/upstream/ltdl.c.diff afterwards
  • Files srfi/Makefile, libguile-ltdl/Makefile, libguile/Makefile: Add "-no-undefined" argument to libxyz_LDFLAGS variables, see also [1]
  • Remove every occurence of fileblocks.* in config.status and run config.status.
  • Set the env variable GUILE_LOAD_PATH to the actual load path, which is different from the one that was stored during compile due to mingw's path translation. Make e.g. export GUILE_LOAD_PATH='\msys\1.0\local\share\guile\1.6'
  • For some srfi's, shared libraries are installed in $prefix/bin, e. g. libguile-srfi-srfi-13-14-v-1-1.dll. You need to copy these DLLs at the same location to a filename that does not have the last trailing "-1", which in this case is libguile-srfi-srfi-13-14-v-1.dll. On Linux, this would have been done by symlinks, but on windows due to the missing symlinks you have to do this copying yourself.

One possible set of configure arguments looked like this:

./configure --disable-elisp --disable-networking --disable-dependency-tracking --disable-libtool-lock --disable-linuxthreads -C --prefix=/usr/local LDFLAGS="-L/lib -L/mingw/lib -L/C/WINNT/system32 -lwsock32 -lregex"

For testing, first try to make sure "guile -v" will run and give you the version number. Then try a simple expression, like "guile -c '(display %load-path)'". However, so far I was unable to actually start the interactive interpreter (by simple "guile") because the readline library is unavailable. So running "guile" will give "ERROR: In procedure quasiquote: ERROR: Unbound variable: SIGBUS".

With the above DLL copying of srfi-13-14, code generation in g-wrap will actually work. It will will always show the error message "command 'indent' not found", though, but this can simply be ignored.

g-wrap

See http://savannah.nongnu.org/bugs/index.php?func=detailitem&item_id=15972

Status: Compile is possible.

Frequent error: If you get the following linker error: 

C:/msys/1.0/mingw/bin/../lib/gcc/mingw32/3.4.4/libgcc.a(w32-shared-ptr.o):: 
undefined reference to `_imp__GetAtomNameA@12'
undefined reference to `_imp__FindAtomA@4'
undefined reference to `_imp__AddAtomA@4'
undefined reference to `_imp__FindAtomA@4'

then it means that your windows DLL directory showed up first before your mingw DLL directory, i. e. the gcc linker command has -Lc:\WINNT\system32 before -L/mingw/lib. This wrong order might be caused from other, linked-in libraries, like from the libguile.la file in guile's library installation. To fix this: Edit the libguile.la file, remove -Lc:\WINNT\system32 so that you can correctly enfore that /mingw/lib comes first in the library search path.

glade

http://gladewin32.sourceforge.net This project offers a large (10MB) Installer which also includes all the rest of the gtk/glib platform, including pkgconfig, libxml2 and various other tools.

glib

http://www.gtk.org/download/ has binary windows packages, but the binary is already included in the glade installer above, so no separate download is necessary.

gnome

A lot of windows binaries for gnome packages missing in the glade package can be found at ftp://ftp.gnome.org.

GConf, Orbit2, gail, gnome-{common, mime-data, vfs}, intltool, libIDL, libart_lgpl, libbonobo{,ui}, libgnome{,canvas,ui} and pango can be found at:

Libgnomeprint, libgnomeprintui and libgtkhtml can be found at:

Gnucash

Instructions on how to tweak ./configure so that it doesn't complain about the missing gnome packages:

As gnucash uses symbolic links quite a lot, in the first build trials we used a trick to make use of symlinks: We completed a normal build on a SMB networked filesystem from a Linux computer, and then accessed that very same directory from windows. This way, the symlinks appear as normal directories from windows.

The ./configure line used was 

./configure --disable-error-on-warning --with-zlib=/c/GTK2-8-10 \
  LDFLAGS="-no-undefined -mms-bitfields -L/lib -L/mingw/lib -L/C/WINNT/system32 -lwsock32 -lregex" \
  CFLAGS="-I/usr/include -I/usr/local/include -D_WIN32 -DLIBLTDL_DLL_IMPORT -mms-bitfields" \
  PKG_CONFIG=/c/GTK2-8-10/bin/pkg-config \
  LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/c/GTK2-8-10/lib PATH="/c/GTK2-8-10/bin:$PATH"

(However, the g-wrap wrapper generator didn't start up successfully when the current working directory was on the SMB share. The g-wrap wrapper generator only works when I'm on the local disc of the computer.)

If the source tree is being checked out on a local windows disk, you need to do some changes in the file config.status. Change the line defining LN_S to read 

s,@LN_S@,touch,;t t

and in the line defining G_WRAP_MODULE_DIR, replace all forward slashes by properly quoted backslashes, e. g. 

s,@G_WRAP_MODULE_DIR@,c:\\\\GTK2-8-10\\\\share\\\\guile\\\\site,;t t

so that guile at runtime will use the windows-style backslash path to find the g-wrap module directory.

Also, in order to get ./configure to run successfully, the following one change was necessary compared to SVN configure.in. Apply that by hand, then run ./autogen.sh, then run ./configure as usual. 

--- configure.in        (Revision 13617)
+++ configure.in        (Arbeitskopie)
@@ -38,7 +38,7 @@
# Check for gcc and intltool (somehow breaks the suggested content
# order, doesn't it? Whatever.)
AC_PROG_CC
-AC_PROG_INTLTOOL
+AC_PROG_INTLTOOL([],[no-xml])
AM_GCONF_SOURCE_2
You can skip this patch if you install ActivePerl and export INTLTOOL_PERL=${PathToPerlBin}. This package includes XML::Parser.

Status

The windows port successfully compiled almost all c files in the standard configuration, which were 415 C files in r13615, and in that revision the following files were the only ones that compiled not yet: 

./src/backend/file/io-gncxml-v2.loT
./src/gnome/io-gncxml-v2.loT


There was a weird linker problem in the early porting effort. The src/gnc-module/libgncmodule.la DLL doesn't export its symbols. This DLL simply won't have any exported symbols, in stark contrast to e.g. src/core-utils/libcore-utils.la, which has all symbols exported just fine. My checking for exported symbols was nm .libs/libgncmodule.dll.a | grep ' T '. Turns out the libtool header <ltdl.h> must have the macros _WIN32 and in particular LIBLTDL_DLL_IMPORT defined or otherwise the linking will fail on windows. Once I do this, these variables marked with "C" disappear in the object file, and all expected symbols correctly appear. That's why these macros are included in the above configure command now. Of course this is nowhere documented, thank you libtool.

TODO

We collect various TODO-items that need to be solved in order to compile gnucash on Windows.

  • ln -s - The windows file systems don't have symlinks. GnuCash uses symlinks extensively all over the build system. The literal ln -s has been replaced by the macro LN_S. This still won't work in all cases because gnucash relies upon content that is created later in the symlinked directory, i.e. simply making a copy is IIRC not sufficient.

The more tricky build errors have to do with file systems and process forks. In src/backend/file: 

io-gncxml-v2.c: In function `try_gz_open':
io-gncxml-v2.c:1221: error: `_O_BINARY' undeclared (first use in this function)
io-gncxml-v2.c:1221: error: (Each undeclared identifier is reported only once
io-gncxml-v2.c:1221: error: for each function it appears in.)
io-gncxml-v2.c:1226: warning: implicit declaration of function `fork'
io-gncxml-v2.c:1245: warning: implicit declaration of function `sleep'

Comments to this on IRC: 

<warlord> it certainly has sleep(), or an equivalent thereof.
<warlord> it probably doesn't have pipe -- I'm not sure if there's a better way to use zlib.
<warlord> cstim: do you have "windows services for unix" installed?
<cstim> errr... not that I know of.
<warlord> You might want to install that.
<warlord> That should give you more unixy interfaces.
<warlord> http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnucmg/html/UCMGch04.asp
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