Re: Bloat in Windows (revisited)

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: address@hidden (Phillip Lord)
> Date: Mon, 17 Jun 2019 16:59:50 +0100
> Cc: address@hidden
> 
> Nikolay Kudryavtsev <address@hidden> writes:
> 
> > I see. You asking for help with Windows made me assume too much. Since
> > MinGW64 can be ran on Unix, I assumed that you managed to do just
> > that. Actually have anyone ever tried that? Is there some big problem
> > that would prevent this from working, or it's just a lot of work in
> > adapting scripts and getting dependencies compiling?
> 
> Eli can probably answer this much better than I. For Emacs-26, there is
> unexec functionality which is going to be platform specific, although I
> presume that problem goes away with the portable dumper which is (I
> guess) portable.
> 
> After that, the basic problem is that Emacs is build using Emacs; first
> temacs, then bootstrap-emacs. So, you have to be able to run Emacs on
> the platform that you are building it on, which conflicts with the idea
> of cross compliation.

That's right: any program that needs to be run as part of its build
breaks cross-building, because cross-building produces binaries that
cannot be run on the host where they are compiled.

This is not Windows specific, this is a known limitation of Emacs: it
cannot be cross-built.  (Most, if not all, of the dependency packages
Phillip builds and bundles _can_ be cross-compiled, though.)