-At the moment there is no attempt to make Unix makefiles and
-PC makefiles compatible, i.e. one makefile is required for
-each environment. The Unix ports use a sophisticated system based
-on the GNU autoconf tool and this system will create the
-makefiles as required on the respective platform. Although the
-makefiles are not identical in Windows, Mac and Unix, care has
-been taken to make them relatively similar so that moving from
-one platform to another will be painless.
-
-Sample makefiles for Unix (suffix .unx), MS C++ (suffix .DOS and .NT), Borland
-C++ (.BCC and .B32) and Symantec C++ (.SC) are included for the library, demos
-and utilities.
-
-The controlling makefile for wxWindows is in the MS-Windows
-directory {\tt src/msw} for the different Windows compiler and
-in the build directory when using the Unix ports. The build
-directory can be chosen by the user. It is the directory in
-which the "configure" script is run. This can be the normal
-base directory (by running {\tt ./configure} there) or any other
-directory (e.g. {\tt ../configure} after creating a build-directory
-in the directory level above the base directory).
-
-Please see the platform-specific {\tt install.txt} file for further details.
+On Microsoft Windows, wxWindows has a different set of makefiles for each
+compiler, because each compiler's 'make' tool is slightly different.
+Popular Windows compilers that we cater for, and the corresponding makefile
+extensions, include: Microsoft Visual C++ (.vc), Borland C++ (.bcc),
+OpenWatcom C++ (.wat) and MinGW/Cygwin (.gcc). Makefiles are provided
+for the wxWindows library itself, samples, demos, and utilities.
+
+On Linux, Mac and OS/2, you use the 'configure' command to
+generate the necessary makefiles. You should also use this method when
+building with MinGW/Cygwin on Windows.
+
+We also provide project files for some compilers, such as
+Microsoft VC++. However, we recommend using makefiles
+to build the wxWindows library itself, because makefiles
+can be more powerful and less manual intervention is required.
+
+On Windows using a compiler other than MinGW/Cygwin, you would
+build the wxWindows library from the build/msw directory
+which contains the relevant makefiles.
+
+On Windows using MinGW/Cygwin, and on Unix, MacOS X and OS/2, you invoke
+'configure' (found in the top-level of the wxWindows source hierarchy),
+from within a suitable empty directory for containing makefiles, object files and
+libraries.
+
+For details on using makefiles, configure, and project files,
+please see docs/xxx/install.txt in your distribution, where
+xxx is the platform of interest, such as msw, gtk, x11, mac.