Re: Emacs binaries for Windows

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: Arash Esbati <arash.esbati@gmail.com>
> Date: Fri, 19 Aug 2016 09:45:41 +0200
> 
> While building Emacs on Windows with Msys2/MinGW-w64 is quite straight
> forward, the main issue is providing the sources of the libraries when
> DLLs should be provided as well.  I wrote a simple script to determine
> the dependencies of the required packages mentioned here:
> 
>     http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/emacs.git/tree/nt/INSTALL.W64#n60
> 
> It downloads the original sources mentioned in every PKGBUILD file and
> includes patches from here:
> 
>     https://github.com/Alexpux/MINGW-packages
> 
> Resulting in:
> 
>     -> du -hc *.tar.gz
>     780K    mingw-w64-bzip2-1.0.6-5.src.tar.gz
>     36M     mingw-w64-cairo-1.15.2-2.src.tar.gz
>     400K    mingw-w64-expat-2.1.1-1.src.tar.gz
>     1.6M    mingw-w64-fontconfig-2.12.0-2.src.tar.gz
>     1.8M    mingw-w64-freetype-2.6.5-1.src.tar.gz
>     95M     mingw-w64-gcc-6.1.0-2.src.tar.gz
>     2.6M    mingw-w64-gdk-pixbuf2-2.35.1-1.src.tar.gz
>     19M     mingw-w64-gettext-0.19.7-1.src.tar.gz
>     628K    mingw-w64-giflib-5.1.4-1.src.tar.gz
>     7.2M    mingw-w64-glib2-2.48.1-1.src.tar.gz
>     1.9M    mingw-w64-gmp-6.1.1-1.src.tar.gz
>     6.6M    mingw-w64-gnutls-3.5.2-1.src.tar.gz
>     3.5M    mingw-w64-graphite2-1.3.8-4.src.tar.gz
>     1.3M    mingw-w64-harfbuzz-1.2.7-2.src.tar.gz
>     1.4M    mingw-w64-jasper-1.900.1-4.src.tar.gz
>     468K    mingw-w64-libcroco-0.6.11-1.src.tar.gz
>     920K    mingw-w64-libffi-3.2.1-4.src.tar.gz
>     4.3M    mingw-w64-libiconv-1.14-5.src.tar.gz
>     3.4M    mingw-w64-libidn-1.32-3.src.tar.gz
>     1.5M    mingw-w64-libjpeg-turbo-1.4.2-2.src.tar.gz
>     936K    mingw-w64-libpng-1.6.21-1.src.tar.gz
>     552K    mingw-w64-librsvg-2.40.16-1.src.tar.gz
>     220K    mingw-w64-libsystre-1.0.1-2.src.tar.gz
>     1.8M    mingw-w64-libtasn1-4.8-1.src.tar.gz
>     2.1M    mingw-w64-libtiff-4.0.6-1.src.tar.gz
>     396K    mingw-w64-libtre-git-r122.c2f5d13-4.src.tar.gz
>     5.2M    mingw-w64-libxml2-2.9.4-1.src.tar.gz
>     584K    mingw-w64-lzo2-2.09-2.src.tar.gz
>     1.8M    mingw-w64-nettle-3.2-1.src.tar.gz
>     1012K   mingw-w64-p11-kit-0.23.2-2.src.tar.gz
>     1.1M    mingw-w64-pango-1.40.1-1.src.tar.gz
>     1.5M    mingw-w64-pcre-8.38-2.src.tar.gz
>     724K    mingw-w64-pixman-0.34.0-2.src.tar.gz
>     92K     mingw-w64-wineditline-2.101-4.src.tar.gz
>     30M     mingw-w64-winpthreads-git-5.0.0.4670.00cda6f-1.src.tar.gz
>     144K    mingw-w64-xpm-nox-4.2.0-4.src.tar.gz
>     1.4M    mingw-w64-xz-5.2.2-1.src.tar.gz
>     1.5M    mingw-w64-zlib-1.2.8-9.src.tar.gz
>     239M    total
> 
> Is this a way to go for Emacs?
> 
> Personally, I recommend another approach where only Msys2 package
> directories (which Emacs was built against) are provided and downloading
> and packaging can be done when a developer/user wants to have it, e.g.:
> 
>     cd mingw-w64-bzip2
>     makepkg-mingw --allsource -sLf
> 
> This is actually what my script does.  Collecting all directories for
> the packages above gives:
> 
>     -> du -h emacs-25.1-rc1-libs.tar.xz
>     464K    emacs-25.1-rc1-libs.tar.xz
> 
> Does this approach comply with GPL?

It's not clear to me what exactly is the question(s) you are asking.
The upshot of the GPL requirements is that the sources -- the same
sources that were used for building the binaries, with any changes
made for that purpose -- should be available for download from the
same site as the binaries.  If the above fulfills this requirement, it
complies with the GPL.  (I cannot tell if this is so because I don't
know what makepkg-mingw does, or what those command-line switches
mean.)

Thanks.