Re: windows installer

[phillip.lord@russet.org.uk (Phillip Lord)]

Drew Adams <drew.adams@oracle.com> writes:

>> > Such binaries used to be delivered more often.  If there
>> > were a simple "push-button" command to create them locally,
>> > which didn't require anything else, I might well take
>> > advantage of that too.
>> 
>> It's not going to get any simpler than "./configure;make install"
>> complete with all the environment that this entails.
>
> Does that work on out-of-the-box MS Windows?  I doubt it.
>
> Emacs users on Windows are not necessarily developers
> of/on Windows.  A "builder" that contained everything
> it needed, and kept it contained, tossing afterward
> whatever is not needed to run the built Emacs, would
> be what I'm talking about.

Yeah, that's not going to happen. Essentially, the build proceedure at
the moment is this:

Install msys
Run pacman to install dependencies
git clone emacs
./configure;make

The last step takes an hour.

Alternatively, installer a snapshot via an installer. I'm struggling to
see a substantial user community who would want something in between the
two.


> Other binaries (e.g. Msys stuff) are less the problem
> that a C compiler, `make', etc.  Push-button building
> without depending on a separate development environment.
> I.e., the builder would bring its own build tools, and
> clean them out when done building.
>
>> > But is it not the case that this "installer"
>> > also _builds_ Emacs for Windows?  If not then apologies
>> > for misunderstanding.
>> 
>> No. The builder builds the installer. It's a self-extracting
>> zip file on steroids.
>
> IIUC, none of those steroids help me, IIUC.  I don't care
> to "install" this or that Emacs build.  I just want to get
> builds or be able to push-button-create them.  I don't want
> something messing with my Windows registry, menus, HOME,
> PATH, or anything else.  Get the build job done without
> depending on anything else pre-existing, and leave no
> footprints behind.


The "leave no footprints" behind means "start-from-scratch". Currently,
building the Emacs zip (including extracting the dependencies) takes
about 3 hours and requires half a gig of downloads.


>> I think we are good here. I put support for snapshot building in, and
>> I've automated as much of the stuff around that as I can. So, I
>> should be able to do it more frequently; probably monthly, as I
>> haven't managed to automate things from start to finish.
>
> Great.  It will be good to return to periodically uploaded builds.  

Up sometime soon!

Phil