Re: GNU Make on Windows

[Paul Smith]

On Fri, 2020-07-31 at 09:45 -0600, Sarah Toth wrote:
> I'm trying to install GNU Make on my windows OS because it is a
> required dependency of elevation 1.0.6 <
> https://pypi.org/project/elevation/>;.
> 
> Currently I have GnuWin32 <
> https://sourceforge.net/projects/getgnuwin32/> installed here
> C:\Users\stoth\Documents\GetGnuWin32\gnuwin32
> 
> However, i still get a "'GNU Make' not found or not usable." error.
> Any ideas on what to do?

Hi Sarah; a few things:

First, please be aware that the GNU project (that's us!) provide Free
Software but we generally only provide the source code.  It's great if
some others out there choose to compile and distribute pre-compiled
versions of our software, but issues with those binary versions are
often best requested from there, instead of us.  This is not because we
don't want to help, but because we're not familiar with these packages,
how they're put together, or how they work.

Of course if you have a C compiler (such as Visual Studio) you can
always compile GNU make yourself rather than using downloaded packages.

Second, when requesting help it's always a good idea to provide the
exact command you typed, and the exact error message you got, cut and
pasted from your command line, rather than paraphrasing.  Even small
changes of phrasing, etc. can mean the difference between knowing what
the problem is and having no idea.

Based on your message, I'm going to assume that in order to run GNU
make you typed the command "GNU make", as in something like:

  C:> "GNU make"

That isn't correct; GNU make is the name of the project but it's not
the name of the program.  As mentioned above, we can't know exactly
what the name of the program is because different people build it
differently.  But, it will probably be named gnumake.exe, gmake.exe, or
make.exe, or some version of that.  So you'd type:

  C:> gnumake

or whatever.  Also, of course you need to be sure that the directory
containing the program is on your %Path% variable (or else us a fully-
qualified path).

Hope this helps!