Re: Avoid duplicate emacs.exe / emacs-$version.exe

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: Juan José García-Ripoll
>  <juanjose.garciaripoll@gmail.com>
> Date: Sun, 29 Mar 2020 11:38:08 +0200
> 
> So let me pause here and retrace this discussion, because I feel like
> the cat that is chasing the red pointer with you guys.
> 
> - My original question was: what is the official build process for
>   making standalone Emasc packages, so as to reproduce the content of
>   the official distros and understand what goes in. That is in a
>   separate thread.

Part of the problem is caused by using "build process" to mean 2
separate things: (a) the process of building Emacs from sources and
installing it locally via "make install", and (b) the process of
producing the binary distribution with or without the optional
libraries (a.k.a. "dependencies").  Let's call (b) something else,
like "distribution" or "building zip".

> Regarding i)
> - I have verified that the distro build process reported in admin/nt
>   starts with CFLAGS="-O2 -static" by default. Some options change it
>   to CFLAGS="-O3 -static -g", but the -static flag is never dropped.

Right, that's the libwinpthread fiasco.  It's an annoyance, but it
isn't too important, since only relatively small libraries are being
linked in statically.

> - I have verified that the files are not hard links. Actually, runing
>   "configure" with the official sources produces this in config.status
>             S["LN_S_FILEONLY"]="/bin/ln -s"
>   so there is no way this is going to create hard links.

Right, this is due to a bug that is embarrassingly old, it turns out.
I've just fixed that on master; for Emacs 27 you can work around by
saying

  make install-strip LN_S_FILEONLY=/bin/ln

when you install Emacs you've built.

>   This makes sense for msys/mingw because in general there may be
>   out there file systems which are still FAT-based and do not
>   support hard links.

Since you are preparing a special-purpose distribution (or so I
understand), you could still use hard links if your users don't need
to support FAT32 filesystems.

In any case, given the small size of the Emacs binary when stripped, I
don't think having two copies of that would be a problem that requires
us to give up on having binaries of old versions available, as on
other systems.

> >> Just a side note: the build-zips.sh script that makes the Windows
> >> distribution files always uses the flag -static when building emacs.
> > I don't think the build should use that.  It is certainly not the
> > default.
> 
> So where is the default? Is the default build process not the one in
> emacs/admin/nt or, in case one builds from sources without creating zip
> files, the one in emacs/nt/? I am reporting data from running those two
> procedures. If you are claiming I am not doing the standard thing, where
> is the standard thing?

See above: this is part of the confusion due to overloaded meaning of
"build process".

> Emacs built from sources:
> $ fsutil hardlink list emacs.exe
> \Users\juanj\emacs-27\bin\emacs.exe
> $ fsutil hardlink list emacs-27.0.90.exe
> \Users\juanj\emacs-27\bin\emacs-27.0.90.exe

Try the same in the src directory.