Re: emacs-20110214 windows binaries

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: Andy Moreton <andrewjmoreton@gmail.com>
> Date: Tue, 15 Feb 2011 18:46:58 +0000
> Cc: help-emacs-windows@gnu.org
> 
> On Tue 15 Feb 2011, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> 
> >> From: Andy Moreton <andrewjmoreton@gmail.com>
> >> Date: Tue, 15 Feb 2011 12:51:08 +0000
> >> Cc: help-emacs-windows@gnu.org
> >> 
> >> When releasing a new binary, could you please add some notes to describe:
> >>  - which Bzr changeset you used to build the binaries
> >>  - the toolchain and lib versions you used (ideally with download URLs)
> >>  - how you configured the build
> >
> > The last one is readily available inside Emacs in the values of
> > system-configuration and system-configuration-options.
> 
> This pair of variables are helpful but provide only partial
> information. In the case of Sean's builds:
> 
>    system-configuration is a variable defined in `C source code'.
>    Its value is "i386-mingw-nt5.1.2600"
> 
>    system-configuration-options is a variable defined in `C source code'.
>    Its value is
>    "--with-gcc (4.4) --no-opt --cflags -Ic:/imagesupport/include"

I was referring to the "how you configured the build" part.  These
two variables tell exactly how configure.bat was invoked.

> This lets me know that he used a MinGW32 toolchain. It does not tell me
> which image library headers were available, or which versions.

When/where is that an issue, except with libpng?

> > The second one is an issue only wrt libpng, and for that you can
> > examine the value of libpng-version.
> 
> How is one meant to discover that this undocumented variable exists ?

Well, I just told you about it, didn't I? ;-)  So now you know.

Also, it's mentioned in nt/INSTALL.

> The values in dynamic-library-alist (formerly image-library-alist) don't
> give any indication of what the build actually supports. It would be
> useful to know which libraries are expected to work.

Everything in dynamic-library-alist is supposed to work; if something
doesn't, please submit a bug report.

> All of this information is also useful for anybody trying to build emacs
> themselves, to understand whether they have the right versions of
> libraries.

The information for that is in nt/INSTALL; again, if something is
missing or unclear, please tell the specifics.