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Building E 0.9.2a on Unix-Like Platforms

Building E

Unpack the source distribution into a directory, cd into "e/src" and say "make". You can treat <directory>/export/dist as the directory containing the unpacked E distribution, ie, the directory where E is to be installed. You can also copy <directory>/export/dist somewhere else, and treat that as the directory where E is to be installed. That way, it won't be overwritten on the next make. Be sure you have an installation of bash >= 2.05. Most Unixoids already have an adequate bash installed.

Then proceed to the installation instructions for your platform (the "Installing" links in this table).

This will not remake the parsers. If you wish to do so, set the environment variable "MAKE_PARSERS" to "true" before running make. If this doesn't work, see BYacc/Java Dependencies.

If you have any troubles building E, check out the new documentation on Environment Variables.

Build-Only Dependencies

If you are only installing E from a binary distribution, or only rebuilding the Java portion for your own use, you can ignore this section. However, if you wish to build an E distribution from sources, then you will need the equivalent of the following tools as well.

Install Cygwin now

The Cygwin Distribution

The E building process relies on a number of UNIX tools. These are available for Windows from Cygnus Support as the Cygwin package. If you wish to build E on Windows, you should download and install a version >= 1.3.12.

BYacc/Java (Berkeley Yacc for Java)

The E source distribution contains the executable binary program byaccj.exe for Windows, and byaccj for Linux/386/glibc. These are actually BYacc/Java from Bob Jamison and others. BYacc/Java is the Berkeley Yacc program extended with a "-j" flag and others for producing Java output. BYacc/Java is covered by the Berkeley License. The sources to byaccj are bundled with the E sources, and byaccj is optionally made as part of making E.

BYacc/Java is only needed if you wish to remake the parsers as part of making E. Usually, this is only necessary of you wish to edit the *.y files in the source tree (term.y and e.y). Since BYacc/Java is a C program, it was causing porting headaches, and most people interested in rebuilding E won't need to rebuild the parsers anyway. So we've added a switch: If you set the environment variable "MAKE_PARSERS" to "true" before running "make", then make will try to build BYacc/Java on your system, and then use it to rebuild the parsers. Otherwise, it will just use the parsers included in the source tree.

Zip Files

Our build process packs up the *.zip files in the distribution by using Info-Zip's highy portable, and highly ported, zip program. Info-Zip's zipping tools are open-sourced with a license that seems to resemble the X11 license, but before redistributing it, you should read it for yourself. The E distributions do not bundle in these tools.

Environment Variables

The following are the main environment variables controlling building, and normally the only ones you will need to be aware of if something goes wrong. Others variables are documented in the various makefiles, especially makerules.mk.

• OSTYPE - To determine whether we are compiling on the Cygwin platform, we check whether this is set to either "cygwin" or "cygwin32" (both have been encountered). If so, we set CYGWINOS to "1". All other conditionals test CYGWINOS.

• CYGWINOS - See above. If you actually are on a Cygwin environment, but OSTYPE has yet a different value, you probably shouldn't change it for fear of screwing something else up. So just set CYGWINOS to "1" yourself.

• JAVA_HOME - If set, it should be set to the directory where the JDK is installed. This is used to find certain executables and jar files that come with the JDK distribution.

  If not set, then the needed executables (eg, "java") are assumed to be on the PATH, and the jar files directly known to the makefiles are assumed to be adequate for building. This is known to work when compiling with javac, and known not to work when compiling with jikes 1.15 and jikes 1.16. See below.

• JAVAC - If set, should be set to executable for the Java compiler. The Java compiler is assumed to be command line compatible with javac or jikes. If the executable is on the PATH, then simple names (like "javac") can be used rather than full pathnames. This can also include some initial compiler options to appear before the others. I often build with JAVAC set to "jikes +E +F". If you use jikes, please use at least version 1.15. E is known not to compile with jikes 1.05. I'm using Jikes 1.16 (download), and at least that version needs to be provided with the JDK's rt.jar file as an explicit component of the -classpath argument. The makefiles do this automatically if JAVA_HOME is set to the JDK's install directory.

  If not set, JAVAC defaults to either "javac" or "$(JAVA_HOME)/bin/javac", depending on whether JAVA_HOME is set.

  The makefiles are set up to fail if the layering of the sources is violated. However, at least E 0.8.17 through 0.8.18 violated this layering in a way that I didn't detect when I built these releases using these makefiles. The problem was that I was compiling with jikes, and jikes is too aggressive at finding and compiling files the other files depend on. Before building a release for others to use, you should build with javac in order to ensure that these upwards dependencies are caught. I will do so from not on as well. Thanks to Darius Bacon and James Freddy for reporting this bug, and to Dean Tribble for diagnosing it.

• JAVACMD - If set, should be set to an executable for running Java that's command-line compatible with the JDK's "java" executable.

  If not set, this defaults to either "java" or "$(JAVA_HOME)/jre/bin/java" depending on whether JAVA_HOME is set.

• JAVADOC - If set, should be set to an executable for generating Javadoc documentation that's command-line compatible with the JDK's "javadoc" executable.

  If not set, this defaults to either "javadoc" or "$(JAVA_HOME)/bin/javadoc" depending on whether JAVA_HOME is set.

• MAKE_PARSERS - E contains a small number (two as of this writing) of *.y files, which are compiled into parsers written in Java using BYacc/Java (see above). The generated parsers are included in the source distribution as sources, even though technically they are not, because most people interested in rebuilding E will not care to rebuild these parsers.

  Those that do wish to rebuild these parsers should set MAKE_PARSERS to "true". This will cause the BYacc/Java executable, byaccj, to be rebuilt from sources, and will cause these parsers to be rebuild from their *.y files using byaccj. The BYacc/Java sources seem to have problems compiling on some platforms. If you encounter such problems, and especially if you figure out how to fix it, please let us know.

  If not set, this defaults to not rebuilding byaccj or the parsers, but just using the generated parsers included in the source distribution as sources.