Re: Making gnulib imports build on Windows

[Martin Stemplinger <mstemplinger@gmx.de>]

Sam Steingold schrieb am 27.01.2011:

> First of all, "windows culture" does not include building one's tools,
> so, IMO, most windows Emacs users use the pre-built executables, thus
> this change will affect only a few people.
Ok then I'm one of the few ;-). I like to run the current development
version so I compile quite frequently.
>
> Second, cygwin has been around for quite some time and it stable enough
> for most purposes. I bet that most people who build Emacs on windows
> already have cygwin installed. Yes, Eli is one important exception, but
> I doubt that there are many (any?) others.

For sure I'm not important but I neither have cygwin installed. Up to
now mingw+gnuwin32 were all I needed to build on Windows. 

> And those who hate cygwin can get gnuwin32.

Gnuwin is needed anyway if you want image support. So at least for me
it would be no big deal to install also the sed package from gnuwin to
build. But I only talk about the windows build on XP, vista and
windows 7 not about the MS-DOS build that Eli also maintains. Things
may be completely different there.

> Third, and most important: it is best to have one build system for all
> platforms instead of separate build systems for unixes and windows.
> I am talking from personal experience: GNU CLISP configures and builds
> with the exact same command line on all platforms (well, you have to add
> "--with-mingw" to configure on windows) and this has saved me a lot of
> maintenance time and effort.

Fully agreed. E.g. make dist is currently broken because some of the
files like BUGS, COPYING, README, INSTALL are not copied to the
install dir. At least I alsways need to copy those manually after make
install for make dist to succeed.

> I have made this suggestion in the past and I know that Eli does not
> like it. However, I am making it again here so that in a few years, when
> Eli inevitably sees the light and relents, I can say "I told you so"
> (provided I am still around :-).
Eli has probably struggled a lot to get the various windows versions
to work and I really appreciate this very much because it helps me to
have the true editor also on windows. 

Regards,
Martin