Re: Process to build standalone Emacs + deps in Windows

[Phillip Lord <phillip.lord@russet.org.uk>]

Juan José García-Ripoll <juanjose.garciaripoll@gmail.com> writes:

> Phillip Lord <phillip.lord@russet.org.uk> writes:
>> Juan José García-Ripoll <juanjose.garciaripoll@gmail.com> writes:
>>
>>> Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:
>>>
>>> Incidentally, here goes a patch to allow build-zips.sh just build zips (with
>>> build-zips.sh -z) and avoid building the installer.
>>
>> I'd rather not add that at the moment. I suspect that there are only two
>> people who have ever run build-zips.sh and one of them (me) doesn't need
>> it.
>
> I think that build-zips.sh is actually far more useful than the current
> build setup that is by default in the nt/ directory. I personally do not
> use the latter, because it forces me to have a full installation of
> Msys/Mingw laying around.
>
> So the fact that only two (maybe now three) people use it is not because
> it is not useful, but because it is not visible. The consequence of this
> is the type of hacky instructions that are out there in the internet,
> advising people to build emacs, install it in a directory and copy all
> of mingw64's *.dll.
>
> Instead, Emacs on Windows should have, by default, a build process that
> allows users to build their own standalone installation, without
> imposing them to use makensis.


build-zips does require a MSYS2 installation and a fairly odd directory
structure. It doesn't hassle me because I only use my windows machine
for building Emacs.

build-zips could do with cleaning up and making more generic, but I lack
the time, especially as it's quite difficult to test.

Phil