Re: Emacs binaries for Windows

[Arash Esbati <arash.esbati@gmail.com>]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

>> 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:
>> [...]
>>     400K    mingw-w64-expat-2.1.1-1.src.tar.gz
>> [...]
>> 
>> Is this a way to go for Emacs?
>
> 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 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).

Best, Arash