Needing the ability to build tclkits on Windows from CVS head on a
semi-regular basis, I finally got around to trying Pat Thoyts'
instructions from the starkit mailing list
[http://groups.google.com/group/starkit/browse_thread/thread/ce8d1c347d9674ac]
to build my own kit. Read that reference first.

There were a couple of things that caused me grief having to do with my
environment (Visual Studio 6.0, XP). Hence this page - so others do not go through the same pain.
The issues were:


   * Do not have spaces in any directory paths. nmake spits weird error messages with no hint as to the real problem. This was my mistake #1.
   * You need to install the Platform SDK - I used the 2003 SP1 version which I already had. This is required for theme support as Visual Studio 6.0 does not come with the required include files.
   * Do not run setenv.cmd from the Platform SDK. This was my mistake #2. Instead explicitly set INCLUDE env var from the command line as shown below.

Here are the explicit instructions. Note this builds [Tclkit Lite] as it uses Vlerq and not Mk.

======
svn checkout svn://svn.equi4.com/kitgen/trunk kitgen
cd kitgen
mkdir 8.6 8.x
======

This retrives the latest version of kitgen and creates directories for the Tcl-Tk sources. The 8.6 directory will contain the version-specific source, 8.x will contain the version-independent source. I believe the directory names do not matter.


======
cd 8.6
cvs -z9 -d:pserver:anonymous@tcl.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/tcl co tcl
cvs -z9 -d:pserver:anonym...@tktoolkit.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/tktoolkit co tk
cd ..
======

checks out the Tcl-Tk sources.


======
cd 8.x
cvs -z9 -d:pserver:anonymous@tcl.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/tcl co thread
cvs -z9 -d:pserver:anonym...@tclvfs.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/tclvfs co tclvfs
svn co svn://svn.equi4.com/vlerq/branches/v4/tcl vqtcl
(for zlib get the tar.gz from equi4 and unpack in 8.x/zlib)
cd ..
======

checks out the version-independent stuff. Note as stated before, we are building with Vlerq so we get Tclkit Lite. If you wanted full Tclkit support, you need Mk and Itcl as well. I have not tried this. In particular, the latest Itcl fails to build with Visual Studio 6.0 because of some max symbol length error.


======
cd 8.6
mkdir win32-ix86
cd win32-i386
echo !include ..\..\Makefile.vc > Makefile
======

simply creates the make file.


======
vcvars32
set INCLUDE=c:\progra~1\MIC977~1\include;%INCLUDE%
======

sets up the build environment. Assumes Visual Studio 6.0 is on your path (for vcvars32). Note INCLUDE environment is prefixed with the path to the SDK include directory. Replace the SDK path with wherever it is installed. I used the short name for safety, though the long name may work as well.


======
nmake VERSION=86
======

The actual build. This will build tclkit-cli.exe and tclkit-gui.exe, the tclsh and wish versions respectively. kit-cli.exe and kit-gui.exe are temporary exes (I think), do not use them.

Note when building Tcl, Itcl files will fail to build with errors. Ignore these, the build will keep going anyways.

That was it (for me, anyways).


<<categories>>
[[
[Category Tclkit] | 
[Category Deployment]
]]