Re: Native compilation on Windows, was Re: Bootstrap Compilation Speed

[Phillip Lord <phillip.lord@russet.org.uk>]

Corwin Brust <corwin@bru.st> writes:

> On Wed, Feb 2, 2022 at 4:07 PM Phillip Lord <phillip.lord@russet.org.uk> wrote:
>>
>> Corwin Brust <corwin@bru.st> writes:
>>
>> > On Mon, Jan 31, 2022 at 9:58 AM H. Dieter Wilhelm
>> > <dieter@duenenhof-wilhelm.de> wrote:
>> >>
>> >> Currently we have 19 DLLs in the /bin folder (28.0.91), whereas 27.2 has
>> >> 77 DLLs!  Corwin could you please check your build configuration, maybe
>> >> together with Phil?  (I'm sorry, I'm still of no help here.)
>> >
>> > Excellent observation.
>> >
>> > I hope Phil will chime-in with suggestions of what I may have
>> > missed/broken.  I'll investigate also, obviously, and others'
>> > kibitzing most welcome too.
>>
>>
>> Strange. What are the differences?
>
> Firstly:  I'm not too sure yet.  I still need to download the Emacs
> 27.2 zip from the official source and do a direct "gap" comparison.
>
> Overall, I'm leaning toward ditching automation of dependency
> detection in favor of adding a separate file.   All efforts to
> automating dependency recursion seem britle, ultimating causing more
> work than they save us as we have to track down one mystery after
> another. The proposed new file will
>  - exhaustively lists each DLL we ship
>  - be referenced in by documentation (such as README.W32)
>  - be loaded by scripts, e.g. build-dep-zips.py
>  - have additional "columns" to name the msys package, and
>  - document why the dependency is required.
>
> I have attached a txt file which is the complete list of what I would
> start out including in that file.  Obviously, it's missing the msys
> package names and has no commentary, so far.   I would probably call
> it admin/nt/dist-build/deps.txt but I don't feel strongly about the
> filename.
>
> WDYT?


I think it sounds sensible, but there is a big unknown. The list of DLLs
that Emacs depends on is not very big and it does not change very much
(I think three or four new ones in the time that I did the build). So,
the question is, how much change will there be in the list of indirect
dependencies; that is partly in the hands of the developers of the
libraries we depend on and partly in the hands of MSYS2. And it also
depends on whether you want to update or check for just minor releases
or just major ones.

My guess would be that this will be managable and that you are unlikely
to find a lot of noise in the process, but it is just a guess.

Personally, I'd just bundle the list as a string in a python script. Why
parse something that you don't have to?

Phil