Re: The 'cross' directory

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Helmut Eller <eller.helmut@gmail.com>
> Cc: rms@gnu.org,  luangruo@yahoo.com,  emacs-devel@gnu.org
> Date: Wed, 16 Aug 2023 23:32:46 +0200
> 
> On Tue, Aug 15 2023, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> 
> >> From: Helmut Eller <eller.helmut@gmail.com>
> >> Is it possible/easy to cross-compile Emacs for Windows on a Unix
> >> machine?  Possibly with the help of Wine for dumping.
> >
> > Maybe, I don't know.  I never tried, and neither I think has anyone
> > else.
> 
> I tried it now.  It kinda works, but it's not easy.  What follows is a
> summary of the steps that I did, for the unlikely case that somebody is
> interested in these things:

Thanks.  The use of Posix configury for building Emacs for Windows was
designed and tested only for native (host = target) builds, and was
never tested otherwise, so some hidden assumptions and other similar
issues are not surprising.

> 4. Executing "make" now wants to execute make-docfile.exe, but can't.

I believe this is not a Windows specific issue.

> 6. Now "make RUN_TEMACS=$(pwd)/src/wine-temacs.sh" wants run bootstrap-emacs
>    to produce all the .elc files.

Only if you build from Git.  If you build from the release tarball,
all the *.elc files are supposed to be already present in the tree.

> 8. Even with all the .elc files in place, make still wants to execute
>    bootstrap-emacs for things like
> 
>    GEN ../lisp/leim/quail/CCDOSPY.el
>    or
>    GEN ../../lisp/cedet/semantic/bovine/c-by.el
>    or
>    ELC ../lisp/loaddefs.elc
> 
>    I just waited and let it proceed, as I didn't know any shortcuts.

Why is this a problem?  If it runs on the host (which it should),
that's okay.  If it runs only after Emacs was dumped, that's indeed a
problem, but again: in a release tarball all those *.elc files should
already be present.