Re: Support for MS-Windows build of Emacs (was: Warnings during building the current master on Win10 with MSYS2/MinGW64)

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: Arash Esbati <arash@gnu.org>
> Date: Wed, 24 Jul 2024 22:16:12 +0200
> 
> after a long time, I built Emacs (baf9f1210a) from master on my Win10
> box and it occurred to me that I get more warnings than I used to.  This
> is with
> 
> $ gcc --version
> gcc.exe (Rev3, Built by MSYS2 project) 14.1.0

Sadly, the MS-Windows port of Emacs is basically not taken care of
anymore.  There are no active developers on board who seem to care
about it, except yours truly.  I see this in the (lack of) responses
to Windows-specific bugs and issues reported to the bug tracker: no
one chimes in, even if I deliberately leave a bug report without
responses for many days.  As my free time is severely limited, I only
care about aspects that affect me directly (and the 64-bit build and
GCC 14 are way outside that scope).

If no one comes forward and starts taking care of the MS-Windows
issues, I'm very close to the decision of declaring the Windows build
of Emacs "unsupported", meaning anyone who needs it are "on their
own", from my POV as the (co)maintainer.

This is not an April 1 joke: if there's a significant community
interested in being able to run and develop Emacs on MS-Windows,
someone should volunteer to take care of the build on a day to day
basis, or else the conclusion is that there's no general interest in
that platform among the Emacs community that is high enough to justify
the investment.

You _have_ been warned!