Re: emacs-20110214 windows binaries

[Andy Moreton]

On Tue 15 Feb 2011, Eli Zaretskii wrote:

>> From: Andy Moreton <address@hidden>
>> Date: Tue, 15 Feb 2011 12:51:08 +0000
>> Cc: address@hidden
>> 
>> When releasing a new binary, could you please add some notes to describe:
>>  - which Bzr changeset you used to build the binaries
>>  - the toolchain and lib versions you used (ideally with download URLs)
>>  - how you configured the build
>
> The last one is readily available inside Emacs in the values of
> system-configuration and system-configuration-options.

This pair of variables are helpful but provide only partial
information. In the case of Sean's builds:

   system-configuration is a variable defined in `C source code'.
   Its value is "i386-mingw-nt5.1.2600"

   system-configuration-options is a variable defined in `C source code'.
   Its value is
   "--with-gcc (4.4) --no-opt --cflags -Ic:/imagesupport/include"

This lets me know that he used a MinGW32 toolchain. It does not tell me
which image library headers were available, or which versions.

> The second one is an issue only wrt libpng, and for that you can
> examine the value of libpng-version.

How is one meant to discover that this undocumented variable exists ?

The values in dynamic-library-alist (formerly image-library-alist) don't
give any indication of what the build actually supports. It would be
useful to know which libraries are expected to work.

All of this information is also useful for anybody trying to build emacs
themselves, to understand whether they have the right versions of
libraries.

Of course thanks are due to Sean for doing the work to publish these builds.

    AndyM