Re: Two strange messages while building Emacs on MS-Windows

[Óscar Fuentes]

address@hidden writes:

>> Why don't you try?  I don't think anyone did, or at least we didn't
>> hear about that.
>
> Okay, I'll have a go.
>
> http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/windows/Getting-Emacs.html
>
> seems to indicate one uses Mingw on windows to compile Emacs.
> Is that correct?
>
> I am familiar with cross-compiling for windows on gnu/linux. Would that
> work? 

For cross-compiling, there are a few difficult passages:

 * Mixed build mode: you build some pieces with native tools (the
   cross-compiler, etc) but other pieces, like the .elc files, shall be
   built with the products (temacs/emacs executable) on the target
   environment, which implies running some temacs/emacs under wine.
   Dumping should also be done under wine.

 * Most likely, the W32 makefiles are far from supporting
   cross-compiling. They also would need to work on the
   GNU/Linux-MSWindows mixed environment and my impression is that they
   strongly depend on MSWindows features all the way.

 * The "regular" configure&make used elsewhere could be adapted by
   setting the appropriate knobs at configure-time and make-time
   (setting variables like CC, EMACS, etc.) The problem I've seen so far
   is that the makefiles works on the native file system, while wine
   works on its own file system (with different root, volume letters and
   all). So commands executed under wine would take the wrong pathnames.
   Adapting that seems tricky.

OTOH, a MS Windows Emacs install appears to work well enough under Wine.
I managed to lock both Emacs and the KDE desktop (!) with a simple
operation (had to switch to a text-mode console and kill wine from
there) but it seems that it should work for byte compiling and,
hopefully, dumping. This means that, starting from `wine cmd.exe',
installing the *native* mingw compiler (not the cross-compiler) and
building with the MS Windows procedure, maybe a full MS Windows build
can be achieved. Not something that I would advise for an official
release, though.