Re: 64 bit official Windows builds

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: Arash Esbati <esbati@gmx.de>
> Date: Thu, 07 Jan 2016 23:47:00 +0100
> 
> I think that providing bare Emacs binaries without the corresponding
> dll's is not really user friendly.  I build Emacs on my Win 64bit
> machine with Msys2/MinGW-w64 and it would be pain if I had to collect all
> dll's myself somehow.

If you build your own Emacs, you already have all those DLLs
installed, right?  So you don't need to collect them, right?

> OTOH, collecting and providing all the sources
> along with the dll's is also not fun.  Can there be a compromise?  For
> Msys2/MinGW-w64, all PKGBUILD files contain references the sources, e.g.:
> 
>     https://github.com/Alexpux/MINGW-packages/blob/master/mingw-w64-libidn/PKGBUILD
> 
> So one could say: Consult the PKGBUILD files for the sources
> (incl. dependencies) for
> 
> - mingw-w64-libtiff
> - mingw-w64-giflib
> - mingw-w64-libpng
> - mingw-w64-libjpeg-turbo
> - mingw-w64-librsvg
> - mingw-w64-libxml2
> - mingw-w64-gnutls
> - mingw-w64-xpm-nox

No, this compromise contradicts the GPL.  The sources must be
available from the same place as the binaries, because otherwise it
isn't practical for the user who wants to rebuild a DLL (e.g., to fix
a bug in it or add a feature) of the exact version used to build
Emacs.  (If she tries to do that with a different version, that
version might be incompatible with the specific version of Emacs she
uses.)  For the same reason, the source distribution found near the
binary should be of the exact same version used to produce the binary,
and include any changes done by whoever built the binary.

This indeed is not trivial to do, which is why the decision whether to
provide the optional libraries together with Emacs is entirely up to
the person who volunteers for the job.  It's not an easy job even if
the libraries aren't included.