Re: Emacs binaries for Windows

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: Arash Esbati <arash.esbati@gmail.com>
> Cc: emacs-devel@gnu.org
> Date: Fri, 19 Aug 2016 18:33:06 +0200
> 
> Thanks for your response.  I try to give an example: Currently, Msys2
> delivers a package named
> 
>     mingw-w64-x86_64-expat-2.1.1-1-any.pkg.tar.xz
> 
> containing `libexpat-1.dll'.  If you clon the repository from
> 
>     https://github.com/Alexpux/MINGW-packages.git
> 
> and cd to `./MINGW-packages/mingw-w64-expat', the command
> 
>     makepkg-mingw --allsource -sLf
> 
> downloads the original sources from
> 
>     https://downloads.sourceforge.net/expat/expat-2.1.1.tar.bz2
> 
> and makes an archive
> 
>     mingw-w64-expat-2.1.1-1.src.tar.gz
> 
> containing the archive from sourceforge and a Msys2 specific patch
> called `001-fix-extension.patch' (plus PKGBUILD & .SRCINFO files).
> 
> My first question is: With the provision made above, can the file
> `libexpat-1.dll' be distributed along with an Emacs binary, which is
> also built against this DLL file? (I will come back with a second
> question later).

IIUC, no.  The sources are really on another server, so they could
remove them, and your script will simply fail.  The GPL requires that
the binaries and the sources be either both available or both absent.

Once again, the only practical way of complying with GPL is to provide
the source archive from the same server as the binaries.  (The GPL
doesn't request that literally, but I know of no other scheme that
really works.)