Re: How to contribute to Emacs Windows(NT) installer?

[Corwin Brust <corwin@bru.st>]

On Sat, Jul 13, 2024 at 12:57 AM Joel Reicher <joel.reicher@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Corwin Brust <corwin@bru.st> writes:
>
> > On Fri, Jul 12, 2024 at 5:07 AM Joel Reicher
> > <joel.reicher@gmail.com> wrote:
> >>
> >> Corwin Brust <corwin@bru.st> writes:
> >>
> >>> I have lots and lots of rather so-so code relating to making
> >>> these builds, most of which I don't use when preparing release
> >>> builds which I do rather manually.
> >>
> >> Do you have those manual steps documented, even roughly?
> >
> > Not outstandingly well, certainly.  Here is the talk I gave at
> > EmacsConf last year:
> >
> > https://emacsconf.org/2023/talks/windows/
>
> Thanks; that made sense. Two questions:
>
> 1) Is there anything you would like help with at the moment? A
> particular bug or two? (You mention some in the talk but that was
> 6 months ago.)

There are a few (three?) open issues that I'm actively working on
(this weekend, finally.  yey).  Depending on how that goes trying out
the patches (building installer from updated scripts) will be very
helpful, if nothing else.   I strongly suspect there are a number of
Windows specific issues lurking in the bug tracker however that takes
a fair amount of effort just to research (searching Debbugs is
something of an art-form).

> 2) How do you provision/construct your build environment? In the
> talk I think you allude to it but never really describe it.
>

I don't have automation to create the build environment.  I simply
install MSYS2/MINGW64 and then run the build with all my preferred
options to configure until it stopps choking on missing dependencies.
There are a number of blog posts and such that I've found using
websearch in the past and which might well (at least) provide a list
of those packages - I haven't tried that approach (some command like:
pacman -S <LONG LIST HERE>) nor written anything similar myself.
Aside from MSYS you will need to NSIS, which turns
admin/nt/build-dist/emacs.nsi plus a installed (via make install)
version of Emacs into emacs-<VER>-installer.exe when the command is
run from parent of the folder into which Emacs has been installed to.

> Regards,
>
>         - Joel
>