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 is an SVN client for windows. You can find one at: http://tortoisesvn.tigris.org

guile

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

  • File libguile.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
  • Files srfi/Makefile, libguile-ltdl/Makefile, libguile/Makefile: Add "-no-undefined" argument to libxyz_LDFLAGS variables, see also [1]
  • 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. Also, for whatever reason g-wrap didn't run on windows, so by using this SMB share, the Linux-generated g-wrap wrappers would simply be recompiled on Windows.

The ./configure line used was 

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

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.
  • Stack size of guile -- When guile gives the error ERROR: Stack overflow, you need to modify the scm-file in question and change the line (debug-set! stack 200000) to this value.
  • src/app-utils/Makefile.am and others: Replace GNOME_CFLAGS by GTK_CFLAGS in CFLAGS variable if we don't need gnome.

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

gnc-backend-file.c: In function `gnc_file_be_get_file_lock':
gnc-backend-file.c:128: error: `EOPNOTSUPP' undeclared (first use in this function)
gnc-backend-file.c:128: error: (Each undeclared identifier is reported only once
gnc-backend-file.c:128: error: for each function it appears in.)
gnc-backend-file.c: In function `gnc_int_link_or_make_backup':
gnc-backend-file.c:335: error: `EOPNOTSUPP' undeclared (first use in this function)
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.)

Comments to this on IRC: 

<warlord> windows certainly has an equivalent of link()
<warlord> It should have some equivalent of gethostid()
<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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