GNU Make for Windows (x86_64) - Inofficial

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

Disclaimer

Note: This Repo is not the official binary release of GNU Make. Please visit the GNU Make Website if you're looking for any official sources or binaries of the GNU project. The goal of this repository is just to be able to build your own binaries to use Make on Windows. It was never endorsed or affiliated with the GNU Project or the Free Software Foundation. By now, there are other installation methods for Make on Windows that are probably a lot more widely used than this repository, e.g. via Chocolately.

As the focus of this repository was sharing a way how to build current releases of Make from source and I don't use Make as often anymore, I'll stop providing binaries for Make.

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 tar.gz.sig file as well, which contains the signature of the tarball. 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.