Re: The 'cross' directory

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: Helmut Eller <eller.helmut@gmail.com>
> Cc: rms@gnu.org,  luangruo@yahoo.com,  emacs-devel@gnu.org
> Date: Tue, 15 Aug 2023 10:05:45 +0200
> 
> On Sun, Aug 13 2023, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> 
> >> From: Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org>
> >> So I think it should have worked to make `temacs' cross-compiling
> >> and then run the rest on the target machine.  That should have been
> >> easy because it did not need to compile or link any C code.
> >
> > This should still work, although I doubt if anyone tried it lately.
> > Emacs with native-compilation cannot be built that way, because the
> > native-code *.eln files are produced at build time, and cannot be
> > included in the tarball (they depend on the architecture of the target
> > machine and include signatures of the Emacs binary and the location of
> > the source *.el files).  But Emacs without native-compilation could be
> > produced in such two steps, except that the target environment still
> > needs some support tools: GNU Make, cp and rm.  (Alternatively, they
> > could invoke the final build commands by hand, if they know how.)
> 
> 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.

You'd still need some GNU tools on the target, as indicated above, or
you will have to type the relevant commands manually on the target.

> Debian has a package gcc-mingw-w64-x86-64, so I suppose installing the
> cross compiler itself is fairly easy.

Yes, it is.  (You need Binutils as well, and the headers of the
optional libraries, like XPM, JPEG, GnuTLS, etc.).