ezwinports

ezwinports -- MS-Windows ports of Unix and GNU software This project is a collection of ports to MS-Windows of GNU and Unix software packages, which either don't have precompiled Windows binaries available, or whose existing ports are buggy or broken or outdated. All the ports are built using the 32-bit MinGW development environment, with or without MSYS. (MSYS is used to run the `configure' scripts and the subsequent build with the Make utility, where these make heavy use of Unix-isms.) The ports are not necessarily of the "latest and greatest" versions you can find upstream. But they are well tested and "work for me" in daily usage (on a couple of XP SP3 boxes and on Windows 7). For each package, you will find here 2 compressed archives: a source archive and a binary archive. The binary archive includes all the executable programs, dynamic libraries, header files, and all the documentation files -- in general, everything that is installed by running "make install". For those of you who don't have Groff installed, I've included formatted versions of man pages, so just a port of Less should be enough to display them. If the executable programs need additional DLLs, they are also included, to make the zip archive self-contained. To install a binary archive, simply unzip it, preserving the directory structure recorded in it, and make sure the 'bin' directory is on your Path. If you already have a public 'bin' directory, unzip the binary archive from that 'bin's parent directory. The other directories, like 'include', 'lib', and 'share' are populated with the rest of the package; in particular, the man pages are in 'share/man', and the Info docs in 'share/info'. It is advisable to unpack all the archives you download from this site into the same tree: this will ensure all the packages work seamlessly together when needed. The source archive includes everything needed to build the binaries; in particular, the sources are already patched with all the changes necessary for the Windows port to function correctly. The source archive also includes the results of configuring the package: the generated Makefile's, the famous config.h header file, etc. It is possible that some of the generated files includes traces of my local directory tree (e.g., I have a Unix-style directory hierarchy under `D:\usr'), in which case you may need to edit those files to adapt them to your machine. In most case, but not always, there's a "diffs" file somewhere that shows the changes I made relative to the original sources. Most of the ports use a small number of DLLs for libraries, such as libiconv or libintl, which I didn't build myself. The GPL requires that the sources of those libraries be available from this very site. Therefore, I provide those sources in the Dependencies/ subdirectory of this directory. The file README.txt there explains how to find the source distribution for the library you are interested in. Here's a short description of each package you will find in this collection: RCS-5.7-1: This is a port of the official RCS v5.7.13 source to MS-Windows. I did this port because the existing GnuWin32 port was broken: any RCS command that required running another program as a subprocess (e.g., rcsdiff) would either crash or produce an error message, due to an unhandled problem in the Windows versions of the spawn* library functions. flip-1.19 This is a Windows port of the `flip' utility, which converts newline format between Unix LF and DOS/Windows CR-LF conventions. Its home page is http://packages.debian.org/sid/flip. I like this utility better than unix2dos/dos2unix, because (a) it's a single program, (b) it doesn't try to convert character sets, (c) it changes files in-place while keeping their time stamp intact, and (d) it keeps its claws off any binary files, so it's safe. texinfo-4.13a-w32 This is a Windows port of the GNU Texinfo package, version 4.13a. My reasons for making this port are (1) the makeinfo.exe available from GnuWin32 crashes for any non-trivial Texinfo source; and (2) info.exe refuses to work on Windows because no one bothered to make its terminal display code work on Windows. This port solves both of these problems. ministat-1.0-w32 This is a Windows port of the ministat program, you can find the original sources here: http://packages.debian.org/sid/math/ministat AFAIK, there's no Windows port of this program anywhere. The program is handy for computing statistics and significance testing of a series of measurements, e.g. running times of some program (for performance comparisons). man-1.4 A Unix `man' command for Windows. Unlike all the other packages on this page, this one is not a port. It is a clone of its Unix namesake, and has absolutely no code common with its cousins. I wrote it originally as part of the DJGPP project (http://www.delorie.com/djgpp/), and later updated it to compile with MinGW and run on MS-Windows as a native Windows program. If you want to view unformatted man pages, you will have to install a port of Groff (it is available from this page, see below). grep-2.10-w32 A Windows port of GNU Grep. The latest port available from GnuWin32 is of version 2.5.4, which was released in Feb 2009, quite some time ago. Also, it always annoyed me that color highlighting of Grep matches is not available on MS-Windows. This port of the latest release 2.10 of Grep fixes that. To use Perl-style regular expression, Grep needs to be built with libpcre, so you have this as a bonus below. pcre-8.21-w32 Library of Perl-compatible regular expressions. I needed this to build Grep capable of "grep -P" mode. (A newer version is available below, but this one is still required for the ported Grep.) file-5.09-w32 A Windows port of file 5.09. The latest GnuWin32 port is of version 5.03, released in May 2009. It has a subtle bug that breaks libtool, and also a few Windows specific gotcha's (e.g., try "file NUL" or "file -"). This port of the latest upstream release fixes those bugs. gmp-5.0.2-w32 p11-kit-0.9-w32 Windows ports of, respectively, GMP (the GNU Multiple Precision Arithmetic library), and p11-kit (a package to load and enumerate PKCS#11 cryptographic modules). I needed them to build GnuTLS and wget, but they can be useful on their own right, so I provide them here. Note that the latest versions of GnuTLS and wget no longer use p11-kit. libxml2-2.7.8-w32 A Windows build of libxml2 2.7.8. The available Windows ports are compiled with MSVC, which means they are not 100% compatible with MinGW. The libxml2 sources include a JScript configuration script, suitable for running with cscript, and a bunch of Makefile's to go with it. But it looks like this suffered some bitrot, and it doesn't support running the test suite, which was important for me to make sure the build is dependable. So instead of using this Windows-specific stuff, I configured the package with MSYS and built it using the Posix configury. The result passed all the tests. To compile and link programs against libxml2, you will need to install libiconv, whose headers and import libraries need to be available to the compiler and linker. You can find the MinGW port of libiconv on the MinGW site: http://sourceforge.net/projects/mingw/files/MinGW/Base/libiconv/ (The libxml2 binaries found here were linked against the libiconv-1.13.1-1-mingw32-dev.tar.lzma tarball.) which-2.20-2-w32 A Windows port of GNU Which v2.20 GnuWin32 does offer a port of this latest version of Which, but it has a few bugs. This port improves on that one: . Under -a, it shows the executables in exactly the same order as the shell would look them up. . It behaves like on Unix when run by a privileged user. . Supports home directories both if pointed to by the HOME environment variable and (if HOME is not set) if pointed to by the USERPROFILE variable. . Is more consistent in its support for backslashes and forward slashes. . It fixes a couple of minor bugs. This second upload fixes a bug whereby 'which' would sometimes crash when invoked with the -a switch. lzip-1.13-rc3 A Windows port of Lzip, "a lossless data compressor based on the LZMA algorithm". The only port of Lzip I'm aware of is the one available from the Lzip download page, which is of version 1.11, quite old. Here you have the latest version as of this writing. xz-5.0.3-w32 A Windows port of xz, lzma, and liblzma. With many GNU projects starting to use .tar.xz archive as their only format of tarballs, having this on your development box is really a must. bzip2-1.0.6-w32 A Windows port of bzip2 and of libbz2. GnuWin32 has only a very old version. MinGW does offer version 1.0.6, but it was built in a way that makes the binaries dependent on the DLL version of libgcc. This means that anyone redistributing these binaries would have to also provide the humongous 75-MB source tarball of GCC, to comply with the GPL license. I think this is ridiculous, so I made my own port, which is free of this restriction. While at that, I also fixed a couple of bugs in the existing ports (e.g., try "bunzip2 -c SOMETHING.bz2 > nul", which is important for measuring decompression speed, if for nothing else). Note that bzip2.exe in this port is statically linked with libbz2 library, so it doesn't need the DLL to run -- another advantage. mairix-0.22-w32 A Windows port of mairix, a program for indexing and searching email messages (http://www.rpcurnow.force9.co.uk/mairix/). As far as I know, there are no native Windows ports of mairix available. I needed it to be able to search my vast email archives using the Emacs mairix-el package. I only tested this port with the mbox mail folders, which is all I have, so caveat emptor. ncurses-5.9-w32 A Windows port of ncurses 5.9. I don't think there's a native Windows port of this available anywhere. I needed it for Readline and for Gawk (below), but it should be useful for many other programs as well. AFAIK, there was never a curses library for Windows, except for a very old port of PDCurses. readline-6.2-w32 A Windows port of the GNU Readline library. The versions offered by GnuWin32 are very old. This is the port of the latest release, and it is built with ncurses, so no Windows-specific hacks were necessary in the sources. openssl-1.0.0g-w32 A Windows port of the OpenSSL package. I needed it for porting XAR (below), and the build offered by openssl.org seems to be compiled with MSVC and also it was unclear to me which of the various packages to install for my needs. So I just built my own. xar-1.5.2-w32 A Windows port of XAR, the extensible archiver from http://code.google.com/p/xar/. I'm not aware of any Windows ports of this available, and I'm not surprised: the code is full of stuff that is only available on latest Posix systems; porting that was quite a job. The main reason why you'd be interested in the result is that it has full support for NTFS security, and can record and restore the entire NTFS security descriptor of each file, complete with its owner, primary group, and DACL. (Caveat: use this feature and the associated -p command-line option with caution: if you don't know what you are doing, you can easily restore files in a way that will prevent you from modifying or deleting them.) mpfr-3.1.0_p2012-03-12-w32 This is a Windows build of the GNU MPFR library version 3.1.0 with the cumulative patches as of 12 Mar 2012 applied. I needed this for building a development version of Gawk, but I understand many projects that use extended-precision calculations can use this (together with GMP, upon which MPFR is built). MinGW, the only alternative, offers a relatively old port, which is at least partly dependent on the GCC runtime DLL. autoconf-2.65-msys This is version 2.65 of GNU Autoconf configured for use with the MSYS environment. The MSYS site does not offer a download of this version, which is needed for configuring GNU Emacs. Unzip the archive from the root of the MSYS tree (_not_ the MinGW tree!). automake-1.11.6-msys This is version 1.11.6 of Automake configured for use with the MSYS environment. It is required for configuring and building GNU Emacs from its bzr repository. Unzip the archive from the root of the MSYS tree (_not_ the MinGW tree!). idutils-3.2.99-2-w32 This is a Windows port of GNU ID Utils. ID Utils and the corresponding Emacs front end is an essential part of my Emacs-based development tool-chain. Without ID Utils, there's no easy way of finding your ways in a large and complex software project. Unfortunately, the port available from GnuWin32 is broken and does not work (mkid emits an error message and quits). So I made my own Windows port of ID Utils version 3.2d (an interim version that was only available from alpha.gnu.org in the past, and now deleted even from alpha.gnu and not available anymore on any GNU site, although you can still find it on the net if you are persistent enough). That port was done in May 2005. Later, I upgraded that port using the user-visible changes from ID Utils 4.5, because I needed ID Utils to support Java and Lisp, which was not available in v3.2d. If you wonder why not just port ID Utils 4.6, then you should know that I found out to my astonishment that 99% of the changes between 4.6 and 3.2d have no user-visible effect. The bulk of the changes were "portability enhancements". As result of these "enhancements", the number of files imported from gnulib (in the lib/ subdirectory) went up from 38 to 143(!), the configury of the package became much more complex, but the net gain for users in terms of functionality was almost nil. Needless to say, none of the real problems that made the Windows port buggy were fixed by these "enhancements"... So instead of porting ID Utils 4.6, I copied the few changes that actually contributed to user-visible functionality to the old 3.2d sources, added to lib/ 3 files that were required for those changes, fixed a couple more of Windows-related problems (e.g., that `sbrk' is not available, and therefore "mkid -s" would not display meaningful memory-usage statistics), and that's what I have now. I call this version 3.2.99, because its source code base is still largely 3.2 vintage. The ChangeLog file in the top-level directory describes the Windows-related changes I made in more detail. The file DIFFS-3.2d-3.2.99.dif shows all the diffs wrt version 3.2d, which include modifications copied from ID Utils 4.5. I also modified the Copyright notices of all the old files, to have their years extended through 2011. This 2nd upload fixes an upstream bug (only corrected in ID Utils 4.6) whereby "lid -F" would mishandle open-ended ranges like 2000.. or ..200. findutils-4.2.30-5-w32 This is a Windows port of GNU Findutils 4.2.30. It includes all the binaries in the original distribution, even those, such as code.exe, frcode.exe, and bigram.exe that you are not supposed to need. I made this port because the GnuWin32 port of v4.2.20 had several grave problems: find.exe was abysmally slow, xargs.exe didn't work at all, and neither did locate.exe. This port includes updatedb.bat, which is a stripped-down replacement for the original updatedb Unix shell script. Please note that xargs.exe in this distribution has some issues that cause it to fail sometimes. But find.exe and locate.exe work flawlessly for me for several years. This fifth upload solves a bug whereby 'find' would sometimes infloop when some of the directories it traverses are symlinks to other directories. The solution is to never descend into a directory that is a symlink (i.e., this port always behaves as if the -P option was specified). As an additional bonus, this port includes 64-bit binariesin a separate findutils-4.2.30-4-w64-bin zip file, prepared by Erwin Waterlander <waterlan@xs4all.nl>. If you are running a 64-bit Windows version, you may wish to use these 64-bit executables, as they are about 5 times faster than the 32-bit ones. zlib-1.2.8-2-w32 This is a Windows build of the latest version 1.2.8 of the venerable zlib library. MinGW provides this version also (under the name libz-1.dll), but it depends on GCC's libgcc_s_dw2-1.dll, which has the same problems as described under bzip2 above, and in addition tends to crash programs at exit (due to a grave bug in the libgcc DLL). So I provide here a build that don't have this problem. You should be able to replace your older zlib1.dll with this version, as the latter is binary-compatible with the old one. This second upload fixes a problem with the zlib.pc file which would fail compilation and linking against zlib in packages that use pkg-config to determine the necessary compilation and link flags. tiff-4.0.3-w32 A Windows build of the latest version 4.0.3 of TIFF library and utilities. Available ports of this library are way outdated. librsvg-2.40.1-2-w32 This is a Windows build of the latest version 2.40.1 of librsvg, the library for manipulation, conversion, and viewing of SVG images. The only other existing port of librsvg that is known to me is from the GTK project, but is outdated, uses much more dependencies that is strictly needed on Windows, and also involves a small "DLL hell", since various dependencies need different versions of the same library (freetype and libpng). By contrast, this port requires only the minimal set of dependencies (see below), and only one version of each dependency. This second upload fixes a problem with packaging the binary archive, which could result in librsvg not working unless installed in d:/usr. pango-1.36.1-2-w32 Pango is a library for laying out and rendering of text, with an emphasis on internationalization. This is a Windows build of the latest version 1.36.1. It is required for librsvg (see above). This second upload fixes a problem with packaging the binary archive, which could result in Pango not working unless installed in d:/usr. cairo-1.12.16-w32 This is a Windows build of the latest version 1.12.16 of Cairo, a 2D graphics library with support for multiple output devices. This minimal build provides only the win32 back-end and a minimal set of "surfaces" (including SVG) which are are needed for librsvg (above). pixman-0.32.4-w32 A Windows build of the latest version 0.32.4 of Pixman, a library that provides low-level pixel manipulation features. It is required for Cairo, and thus needed for librsvg (above). libcroco-0.6.8-w32 This is a Windows build of libcoroco, a standalone CSS2 parsing and manipulation library. It is required by librsvg (above). gdk-pixbuf-2.30.2-w32 The Gdk Pixbuf is a toolkit for image loading and pixel buffer manipulation. This is a Windows build of the latest version 2.30.2 of Gdk Pixbuf. It is needed for librsvg (above). glib-2.38.2-w32 A Windows build of the latest version 2.38.2 of Glib, a set of low-level libraries useful for providing data structure handling for C, portability wrappers and interfaces for such runtime functionality as an event loop, threads, dynamic loading and an object system. It is required for librsvg (above). lzo-2.06-w32 LZO is a data compression library which is suitable for data decompression and compression in real-time. This is a Windows build of its latest version 2.06. This library is required for one of the components of Cairo (above). git-merge-changelog-0.1-2-w32 If you use git (msysGit) on Windows, you will have merge problems when merging from branches that modified ChangeLog files. This merge driver solves those annoying problems, but msysGit distribution doesn't provide it for some reason, and there doesn't seem to be a build-ready source archive available anywhere. Building out of gnulib git repo, where the sources live, on a Windows system is not for the faint at heart. So here you have the package, complete with sources and binaries. See the file README.txt for installation and configuration instructions. This second upload fixes a bug whereby the merge would always produce a file with DOS-style CR-LF end-of-line (EOL) format, even if the original files used Unix EOLs. This is an upstream bug, fixed in this port. hunspell-1.3.2-3-w32 This is a Windows port of Hunspell v1.3.2. Hunspell (http://hunspell.sourceforge.net/) is a spell-checker with support for peculiarities of many languages and with Unicode character codepoints support out of the box. To the best of my knowledge, there's no other Windows port of Hunspell. In addition, this port includes fixes for bugs, both Windows-specific and platform-independent. The result works well for me as the back-end of the spell-checking features in Emacs. The interactive curses-based user interface also works, although (due to limitations of the ported ncurses) only characters in the current ANSI codepage are supported. The binary distribution includes dictionaries for US English and UK English. You can find the dictionaries for other languages on the Internet; install them into share/hunspell sub-directory of your Hunspell installation directory. This third upload fixes a subtle issue with running Hunspell under Emacs 24.4 and later, whereby the default dictionary would not be set correctly during initialization. All the previous bugfixes are also included, such as failure to rename the temporary file with the text corrected by spell-checking to the original name of the file submitted to the speller, and a couple of other minor bugs reported lately to the Hunspell bug tracker. giflib-5.1.0-w32 This is a Windows build of the latest version 5.1.0 of the giflib library. Gnuwin32 has only an ancient version 4.1.4, and I didn't find any Windows port of the 5.x series. (The 'lua-files' project seems to have a binary, but no sources.) The few problems that I found and corrected while testing the previous port were accepted upstream, so this release builds with MinGW out of the box; thus no DIFFS here. libpng-1.6.12-w32 This is a Windows build of the latest version 1.6.12 of libpng, the official PNG image library. It includes several important security and stability fixes, and is binary-compatible with the previous 1.6.x releases, so you are well advised to upgrade. As GnuWin32 libpng ports are very old, and even the GTK site falls behind, there's a need to have the latest PNG library available for Windows. So here you have that. jpeg-v9a-w32 This is a Windows build of the latest version 9a of jpegsrc, the IJG's library for JPEG image compression. Like with libpng, it's high time Windows users had the latest JPEG library available to them. jpeg-v8d-w32 This is a Windows build of an older version 8d of jpegsrc, the IJG's library for JPEG image compression. It is here for those users who have binaries linked against this older version (since the MSYS2 project doesn't yet offer v9a). libcrypt-w32 This is a small library to encrypt and decrypt a block of data. This is needed for Guile and GDB below. gc-7.2f-w32 This is a Windows build of the Boehm-Demers-Weiser garbage collector (a.k.a. "Boehm GC"). It is used by Guile below. I'm not aware of any Windows binaries of this library. The library was built with Win32 threads (_not_ pthreads!), so if you need to use it with a package that uses pthreads, these binaries are not for you. libunistring-0.9.3-w32 This is a Windows port of libunistring 0.9.3, a library that provides functions for manipulating Unicode-encoded strings, and for manipulating C strings according to the Unicode standard. The MinGW site offers a binary distribution of the same version, but it is severely broken on Windows: it cannot be used after setting a non-default locale by calling 'setlocale'. This port fixes the bugs which cause this breakage, and which render Guile (below) unusable for i18n features. libffi-3.1-w32 This is a Windows build of the latest version 3.1 of the libffi library, which provides a portable, high level programming interface to various calling conventions. It is required for Guile below and also for librsvg above. guile-2.0.11-2-w32 This is a Windows port of the latest Guile 2.0.11. It is heavily patched wrt the upstream sources, and supports all features that can be reasonably supported on MS-Windows. One notable exception is threads: this port was configured without threading support, because Guile built with threads (using the Windows port of pthreads) is unusable: it hangs or crashes in many simple and trivial programs, and cannot even compile its own Scheme files. The Guile binary and library in this distribution pass all the tests in the test suite. I'm not aware of any reliable Windows port of Guile anywhere. If you install this anywhere but d:/usr, you will need to set 2 environment variables: set GUILE_LOAD_PATH=x:\foo\share\guile\2.0 set GUILE_LOAD_COMPILED_PATH=x:\foo\lib\guile\2.0\ccache where "x:\foo" is the directory from which you unzipped the Guile binary zip file. This 2nd upload fixes a couple of minor problems in the code, and also includes DLL shared libraries in addition to static libraries. libgsf-1.14.30-w32 This is a Windows build of libgsf, the GNOME Structured File Library, a library for reading and writing structured file formats. It supports reading text, XML, compressed data, MS OLE2, metadata, and OASIS Open Document streams. It is required by libpst, but can also be useful on its own, in particular for porting GNOME packages. libpst-0.6.63-w32 This is a Windows port of the latest release 0.6.63 of libpst, a library and a set of utilities to read and convert Outlook *.pst files. It can convert email messages in the *.pst files to mbox or MH or KMail files, and Contacts to vcard or ldif formats. (I only tested and used the conversion to mbox files, including their display in Emacs.) The port includes a few Windows specific patches to fix display of non-ASCII characters on the Windows console. I'm not aware of any recent Windows port of this package. It was useful for me, so I'm guessing it might be useful to others. libtasn1-4.2-w32 This is a Windows build of version 4.2 of the GNU ASN1 library. A port of a newer version 4.9 is available here, but I'm keeping this because some packages here were linked against this older version. nettle-2.7.1-w32 A Windows build of version 2.7.1 of the Nettle library. A port of a newer version 3.3 is available here, but I'm keeping this because some packages here were linked against this older version. libidn-1.29-w32 A Windows port of Libidn, a package designed for internationalized string handling based on the Stringprep, Punycode and IDNA specifications defined by the IETF Internationalized Domain Names (IDN) working group, and used for internationalized domain names. Used by Wget for correct handling of internationalized names of hosts and URLs. gnutls-3.3.11-w32 A Windows port of GnuTLS 3.2.11. Needed to build wget (below), and is also useful for Emacs. A port of a newer version 3.4.15 is available here, but I'm keeping this because some packages here (wget) were linked against this older version. pcre-8.36-w32 Version 8.36 of the library of Perl-compatible regular expressions. I needed this to build wget (below). The C++ bindings of this library is provided only as a static library, to avoid dependency on libstdc++ DLL. libpsl-0.6.2-w32 This is a C library for handling the Public Suffix List, a list of known domain suffixes, such as .com and .co.uk, under which Internet users can register domain names. This library is used by wget (below) for checking cookies. I'm not aware of a Windows port of this library. wget-1.16.1-w32 A Windows port of wget 1.16.1. The GnuWin32 port is of version 1.11.4, which was released a few years ago. This is the latest released version, as of this writing (Dec 2014). It was configured and built with as many optional features as practical on Windows. groff-1.22.3-2-w32 A Windows port of the latest release 1.22.3 of GNU Groff. I successfully used Groff-1.19.1 from GnuWin32 for several years. However, the latest man pages emit more and more error messages, because Groff 1.19 doesn't support several new roff features. GnuWin32 offers version 1.20, but it was released in Jan 2009, and at least its source GnuWin32 distribution suspiciously lacks several important directories. Therefore, I built the latest release 1.22.3 using MSYS and MinGW, and here you have the result. Note: this distribution was built without Ghostscript being installed, so the HTML back-end (grohtml) and the PDF formatter (pdfroff) were not tested, and might even not work due to some missing file or font. This third upload fixes subtle problems with using Windows-style file names with backslashes on Groff command lines, and also allows to install Groff anywhere without setting GROFF_BIN_PATH in the environment. The changes to fix that were accepted upstream, so the next release will have them out of the box. pkg-config-0.28-w32 This is a MinGW build of the latest version 0.28 of the pkg-config utility. The GTK site, which previously offered a slightly outdated version 0.26, no longer does that, and I'm not aware of any other Windows port of pkg-config. So here you have the latest version. libXpm-3.5.11-2-w32 This is a MinGW build of the latest version 3.5.11 of the libXpm-noX DLL. The last version offered by GnuWin32 is the ancient v3.5.1, and later versions are not available in a single binary package that includes everything needed to build programs (like Emacs) against libXpm; instead, you need to collect files from various binary and source packages. Here you have everything together, and as a bonus this includes a small program cxpm for checking validity of XPM files. This second upload fixes a few problems in the header files that go with the library. gawk-4.1.4-w32 A Windows build of the latest version 4.1.4 of Gawk. This was linked against Readline, and so has a fully functional command-line editing interface, including command history, when using the Gawk debugger. Also, this port was linked against the MPFR library, and so supports arbitrary-precision floating-point arithmetics, when invoked with the -M or --bignum command-line options. See the node "Gawk and MPFR" in the manual for the details. The new dynamic extensions feature is also supported, see the node "Dynamic Extensions" in the manual. Several ready-to-use extensions, in the form of DLL files, are bundled; you will find them in the lib/gawk/ directory of your Gawk installation. Last, but not least, this version supports network and co-routines. libtasn1-4.9-w32 This is a Windows build of version 4.9 of the GNU ASN1 library, a highly portable C library that encodes and decodes DER/BER data following an ASN.1 schema. It is used by GnuTLS for reading certificate files. nettle-3.3-w32 A Windows build of the latest version 3.3 of the Nettle library, a low-level cryptographic library used by GnuTLS and other packages. gnutls-3.4.15-w32 A Windows port of GnuTLS 3.4.15, the latest stable release of GnuTLS. Needed to build wget (below), and is also useful for Emacs. Unlike a previous port of GnuTLS 3.0.9, this port was built without the PKCS#11 library, because that one is only needed for authentication using smart cards, for which on Windows you will have to rebuild GnuTLS with the corresponding DLLs for hardware support. Therefore, there's no p11tool.exe in the binary distribution. Another change is that this version comes with Guile bindings, so if you have Guile installed, you will be able to use GnuTLS from Guile programs. The C++ bindings of GnuTLS are only provided as a static library, since a DLL built for that is dependent on the libstdc++ DLL, which will then require me to provide the whole GCC source tarball here, and might also get you into a DLL hell if your GCC version is different from mine. Sorry. make-4.2.1-with-guile-w32 make-4.2.1-without-guile-w32 This is a MinGW build of the latest version 4.2.1 of GNU Make. There are 2 different binary zip files here: with and without Guile support. The zip without Guile is much smaller, so if you are sure you won't need Guile scripting in Makefiles any time soon, I recommend to install the "without-guile" version. The sources for both these binary zips are in make-4.2.1-w32-src.zip. For the "with-guile" version, if you install it anywhere but d:/usr, you will need to set the following 2 environment variables: set GUILE_LOAD_PATH=x:\foo\share\guile\2.0 set GUILE_LOAD_COMPILED_PATH=x:\foo\lib\guile\2.0\ccache where "x:\foo" is the top directory of the Make installation, under which you have the tree of the unzipped files. (If you used unzip.exe to unzip the distribution, the top directory is the one from which you ran unzip.exe.) These variables are required for the Guile support in Make to be able to initialize itself. zstd-1.1.1-w32 This is a Windows build of Zstandard v1.1.1, a real-time compression algorithm, providing high compression ratios. Included are a couple of programs to compress and uncompress files, and a library that allows including zstd compression capabilities in applications. gperf-3.1-w32 This is a Windows build of the latest version 3.1 of GNU 'gperf' perfect hash function generator utility. The only other Windows port of 'gperf' is available from the GnuWin32 site, which offers an ancient version 3.0.1. lz4-1.7.5-w32 LZ4 is a fast, scalable, lossless compression algorithm. This is a Windows port of the latest release 1.7.5 of LZ4. It is needed for libarchive (below), but is also useful on its own right. I'm not aware of any Windows port of this package. libarchive-3.3.1-w32 A Windows port of the latest release of libarchive and of bsdtar, bsdcpio, and bsdcat programs. The latter is a relatively new addition to the package. GnuWin32 has an old version 2.4.12 released in 2008. MinGW offers a newer version 2.8.3, but it is still old (7 years ago). Even the MSYS2 project offers only v3.1. This is the port of the latest release, and it fixes a few upstream bugs. This latest release of bsdtar is really wonderful: it supports most every format of compressed archives on Earth. gzip, xz, lzma, zip, rar, 7-zip, pax, rpm, even CAB! You name it, it supports that. More importantly, it does all compression and decompressing in memory, without invoking external programs, so it's faster (but still uses the same algorithms and code via the corresponding libraries it links against). It also supports UTF-16 file names on Windows, therefore you can now unpack archives created in other Windows locales, and still have the files unpack under correct names. In general, the degree of Windows support is very good in this package, in stark contrast to GNU Tar, whose current maintainers are much less friendly to Windows support. gdb-8.0-w32 A Windows build of the latest version 8.0 of GDB. The MinGW site offers only an outdated version 7.6.1, which was on top of that built without Python support. Here you have the latest release that supports Python and Guile. One caveat: you will have to download and install Python 2.6.6 from https://www.python.org/download/releases/2.6.6/; gdb.exe in this archive depends on the Python library and DLL, and will not run without it being available on your system. (I don't want to distribute Python binaries, because then I would also need to provide the Python sources from this site, which is way too much.) The NEWS file in 'share/doc/gdb-VERSION/' describes all the new and improved features in this release. Starting with GDB 7.10, the data files in this port are installed into a version-specific directory 'share/gdb/VERSION/'. This is so you could keep previous versions of GDB renamed as, say, gdb-x.y.z.exe, and still be able to invoke them and let them find their data files. If this is the first GDB port you are installing that uses this structure, I suggest to move the data files of the previous version -- everything under share/gdb/ -- into a version specific subdirectory share/gdb/X.Y.Z/, where X.Y.Z is the version of GDB you had before this one. Guile dependencies are included in this binary distribution. If you install this anywhere but D:\usr, you will need to set 2 environment variables: set GUILE_LOAD_PATH=x:\foo\share\guile\2.0 set GUILE_LOAD_COMPILED_PATH=x:\foo\lib\guile\2.0\ccache where "x:\foo" is the top directory of the GDB installation, under which you have the tree of the unzipped files. (If you used unzip.exe to unzip the distribution, the top directory is the one from which you ran unzip.exe.) These variables are required for the Guile support in GDB to be able to initialize itself. If GDB complains at startup about being unable to load Python modules, you may need to set the PYTHONPATH environment variable to point to your Python 2.6.6 installation, like this: set PYTHONPATH=C:\Python26\DLLs;C:\Python26\Lib;C:\Python26\lib\plat-win;C:\Python26\Lib\lib-tk;C:\Python26;C:\Python26\Lib\site-packages (assuming you installed Python in C:\Python26). This port also supports TUI, the Text-mode User Interface; invoke GDB with the -tui command-line option to activate it. Note that this mode should only be used when invoking GDB from the shell prompt, not, for example, when invoking GDB as a subprocess of Emacs. texinfo-6.4-w32 This is a Windows build of the latest version 6.4 of the GNU Texinfo package. Note that makeinfo was reimplemented in Perl starting from version 5.0 version, which made it about 18 times slower. Starting with this version, Perl extensions in C can used, which speed up makeinfo by 40%, but these extensions make makeinfo dependent on a specific binary version of Perl you should have installed, and create licensing issues. Therefore, the binary distribution of this port doesn't include the extensions, and you may wish keeping makeinfo.exe from version 4.13 around for the time being. If you do want to use this new makeinfo, you will need to install Perl and make sure it is on PATH. binutils-2.29-w32 This is a Windows build of the latest version 2.29 of the GNU Binutils. The latest Binutils offered by the MinGW site lag behind the upstream releases; here you have the latest one. In addition to bringing the latest features, this build supports both the 32-bit i386 and the 64-bit x86_64 targets, even when running on a 32-bit OS. This allows using these utilities with 64-bit binaries on 32-bit versions of Windows. Note that binutils are built in a separate directory, build-binutils-X.YY, so if you are looking for the products of the build, like config.log and the Makefile's, in the source zip file, look in that directory, not in binutils-X.YY.