Re: Emacs binaries for Windows

[Phillip Lord]

Arash Esbati <address@hidden> writes:
> I know this topic has been discussed in past and my apologies in advance
> if I'm beating the dead horse again and a longish message.

It's not a dead horse at all. It's an issue which, to my mind, needs
solving.

> I'm raising this question after seeing some queries again about
> availability of Emacs on Windows (possibly incl. all necessary
> libraries (DLLs)).
>
> While building Emacs on Windows with Msys2/MinGW-w64 is quite straight
> forward, the main issue is providing the sources of the libraries when
> DLLs should be provided as well.  I wrote a simple script to determine
> the dependencies of the required packages mentioned here:
>
>     http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/emacs.git/tree/nt/INSTALL.W64#n60


I'd be interested to see this script.


> It downloads the original sources mentioned in every PKGBUILD file and
> includes patches from here:
>
>     https://github.com/Alexpux/MINGW-packages
>
> Is this a way to go for Emacs?


> Personally, I recommend another approach where only Msys2 package
> directories (which Emacs was built against) are provided and downloading
> and packaging can be done when a developer/user wants to have it, e.g.:
>
>     cd mingw-w64-bzip2
>     makepkg-mingw --allsource -sLf
>
> This is actually what my script does.  Collecting all directories for
> the packages above gives:
>
>     -> du -h emacs-25.1-rc1-libs.tar.xz
>     464K    emacs-25.1-rc1-libs.tar.xz
>
> Does this approach comply with GPL?


I don't know enough about msys2 to understand the difference in your
approaches, but AFAICT, -libs.tar.xv contains all the source, so that
you could build the libraries, then it does, yes.

At the moment, Emacs ships with a single binary (libnox4) otherwise it
looks terrible. But, I think that the basic windows download cannot do
an HTTP call and display the results is unfortunate.

Current builds are for 32 bit as well as 64 bit. Can that be replicated
also?

Phil