DO NOT USE! Version 4.2.1-3 is a maintenance release; it updates to the latest upstream Busybox and to the new build scripts.

The xPack Windows Build Tools is a standalone Windows binary distribution of GNU make and a few other tools required by the Eclipse Embedded CDT (formerly GNU MCU/ARM Eclipse) project, but the binaries can also be used in generic build environments.

There are separate binaries for Windows (x64 and x86).

Download

The binary files are available from GitHub Releases.

Prerequisites

  • x86/x64 Windows: Windows 7 with the Universal C Runtime (UCRT), Windows 8, Windows 10

Install

The full details of installing the xPack Windows Build Tools are presented in the separate Install page.

Easy install

The easiest way to install Windows Build Tools is with xpm by using the binary xPack, available as @xpack-dev-tools/windows-build-tools from the npmjs.com registry.

With the xpm tool available, installing the latest version of the package and adding it as a dependency for a project is quite easy:

cd my-project
xpm init # Only at first use.

xpm install @xpack-dev-tools/windows-build-tools@latest

ls -l xpacks/.bin

To install this specific version, use:

xpm install @xpack-dev-tools/windows-build-tools@4.2.1-3.1

For xPacks aware tools, like the Eclipse Embedded C/C++ plug-ins, it is also possible to install Windows Build Tools globally, in the user home folder.

xpm install --global @xpack-dev-tools/windows-build-tools@latest --verbose

Eclipse will automatically identify binaries installed with xpm and provide a convenient method to manage paths.

Uninstall

To remove the links from the current project:

cd my-project

xpm uninstall @xpack-dev-tools/windows-build-tools

To completely remove the package from the central xPacks store:

xpm uninstall --global @xpack-dev-tools/windows-build-tools

Compliance

The xPack Windows Build Tools uses programs from other projects.

The current version is based on:

Changes

There are no functional changes from original projects.

Bug fixes

  • none

Enhancements

  • none

Known problems

  • #19 A bug was identified in Microsoft UCRT, affecting programs which spawn subprocesses, like sh.exe, make.exe, etc; a workaround was identified for BusyBox, and the problem was fixed in v4.3.0-1.

Shared libraries

The dependencies are either linked as static libraries or the DLLs are included, so the binaries should run on any Windows system.

Documentation

  • none

Build

The binaries were built using the xPack Build Box (XBB), a set of build environments based on slightly older distributions, that should be compatible with most recent systems.

The scripts used to build this distribution are in:

  • distro-info/scripts

For the prerequisites and more details on the build procedure, please see the README-MAINTAINER page.

CI tests

Before publishing, a set of simple tests were performed on an exhaustive set of platforms. The results are available from:

Tests

The binaries were testes on Windows 10 Pro 32/64-bit.

Install the package with xpm.

The simple test, consists in starting the binary.

.../xpack-windows-build-tools-4.2.1-3/bin/make --version

A more elaborate test would be to run an Eclipse build.

Checksums

The SHA-256 hashes for the files are:

939edfd488642693fadf564e5285cbb388bad2bd550b6b061a4b54daf58eca47
xpack-windows-build-tools-4.2.1-3-win32-ia32.zip

f3081840c0bb7df1abc4d3379546ea7286b2f0282cc148ed105a23432bbc6f9b
xpack-windows-build-tools-4.2.1-3-win32-x64.zip

Deprecation notices

32-bit support

Support for 32-bit x86 GNU/Linux and x86 Windows will most probably be dropped in 2022. Support for 32-bit Arm GNU/Linux will be preserved for a while, due to the large user base of 32-bit Raspberry Pi systems.

GNU/Linux minimum requirements

Support for RedHat 7 will most probably be dropped in 2022, and the minimum requirement will be raised to GLIBC 2.27, available starting with Ubuntu 18 and RedHat 8.

Download analytics

Credit to Shields IO for the badges and to Somsubhra/github-release-stats for the individual file counters.