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GNU Make for Windows (x86_64)

This repository is meant to provide an easy way to cross-compile GNU Make for Windows as trusted binaries of the most recent version were previously hard to find.

Using the Binaries

Head to the Releases page to download make.exe together with any required .dll files as a .zip-file. Create a new directory, e.g. C:\GNUMake where you can later extract the archive to. Now unpack the downloaded archive to this directory using the Windows explorer (or another file compression utility of your choice).

To make sure that you can invoke the make command from a shell, add the directory you created previously to your PATH environment variable first. You may have to restart your shell (or your system just to make sure) afterwards. You can then test whether make is installed properly by entering make --version into a shell.

The output should look similar to this:

GNU Make 4.4
Built for x86_64-w64-mingw32
Copyright (C) 1988-2022 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later <https://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>
This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it.
There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.

Building Locally

This part was tested on Fedora 37 only so far, so you may have to adapt the package names or install additional ones.

  1. Install mingw64-gcc

  2. Clone this repository

  3. Download the tar.gz file of the GNU Make release

    Fetch the tarball you would like to build from the project website or one of the mirrors listed there.

  4. (Optional, but recommended): Verify the integrity of the downloaded file

    Download the corresponding by downloading the corresponding tar.gz.sig file as well. Import the public key of the developer who signed the file. As of writing, the latest key for signing the releases was announced here. You can now verify the signature by running gpg --verify make-*.tar.gz.sig.

  5. (Optional): Update the build_version.sha256sum file

    If you would like to build a version of GNU Make that differs from the latest one used here, you have to update the build_version.tar.gz file because it determines the filename and hash which the build-script uses later. To update it, run the following command (adapt to your make version number).

    sha256sum make-4.4.tar.gz > ./build_version.sha256sum

  6. Compile

    Open a shell and run the cross_build_w64.sh script included in this repository.

If everything went well, you can find make.exe and its dependent .dll files in the make-<your version>/dist directory.

Known Limitations

  • The built binaries come without the Guile Integration of GNU Make.
  • Currently the builds are not reproducible. I'm still investigating what causes the differences. If you have an idea, how to adapt this repo to produce reproducible artifacts, PRs are welcome 😄
  • Limited Testing: I'm only using a tiny subset of Make's functionalities. If you encounter issues related to how these binaries are built, feel free to create an issue. Please note however that I'm not a maintainer of GNU Make itself, I only have built this repository.