Open Watcom v2 Unofficial Fork

This document gives an overview of this project and a quick description of the source tree layout. For build instructions see the file BUILD.md.

Overview

This project is a friendly fork of Open Watcom. The primary purpose of this fork is to forward development on 64 bit support in the Open Watcom tools. We are interested in both creating tools that are themselves 64 bit executables and also that can generate and manipulate 64 bit code. However, all reasonable contributions intended to improve or extend Open Watcom are also welcome.

We owe a debt of thanks for all the work done on Open Watcom over the years by contributors too numerous to name here. Without their efforts Open Watcom would not be where it is today. We hope to continue developing and improving Open Watcom in the same tradition.

Binary installers of this version of Open Watcom can be downloaded from SourceForge. The binaries are refreshed on an irregular schedule. Bug reports, enhancement requests, and related discussion should be done on the GitHub site issues list.

Source Tree Layout

Open Watcom allows you to place the source tree almost anywhere (although we recommend avoiding paths containing spaces). The root of the source tree should be specified by the OWROOT environment variable in setvars (as described in BUILD.md). All relative paths in this document are taken relative to that location. Also this document uses the backslash character as a path separator as is normal for DOS, Windows, and OS/2. Of course on Linux systems a slash character should be used instead.

The directory layout is as follows:

bld
  - The root of the build tree. Each project has a subdirectory under
    bld. For example:
      bld\cg       -> code generator
      bld\cc       -> C compiler
      bld\plusplus -> C++ compiler
      (see projects.txt for details)

build
  - Various files used by building tools. Of most interest are the
    *.ctl files which are scripts for the builder tool (see below)
    and make files (makeint et al.).

docs
  - Here is everything related to documentation, sources and tools.

distrib
  - Contains manifests and scripts for building binary distribution
    packages.

contrib
  - Third party source code which is not integral part of Open Watcom.
    This directory contains especially several DOS extenders.

build\bin
  - This is where all build tools created during phase one are placed.

rel
  - This is default location where the software we actually ship gets
    copied after it is built - it matches the directory structure of
    our shipping Open Watcom C/C++/FORTRAN tools. You can install the
    system by copying the rel directory to your host and then setting
    several environment variables.

    Note: the rel directory structure is created on the fly. The
    location of rel tree can be changed by `OWRELROOT` environment
    variable.