Re: Are there non-mingw32 binaries for Windows?

[Richard Copley <rcopley@gmail.com>]

On 17 November 2016 at 21:46, Kevin Layer <layer@known.net> wrote:
> Óscar and Eli, thanks.  I'll proceed with the mingw32 binaries.
>
> On Thu, Nov 17, 2016 at 12:41 PM, Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> wrote:
>>> From: Kevin Layer <layer@known.net>
>>> Date: Thu, 17 Nov 2016 09:54:55 -0800
>>> Cc: emacs-devel@gnu.org
>>>
>>> I've just never used the mingw32 binaries and the installation is more
>>> complex.  I have been repackaging the older, single-zip binaries with
>>> an NSIS installer, since it's just easier for Windows people to run an
>>> exe to install.
>>
>> The current binaries are also provided as a single zip file.  The
>> other zip file is for optional libraries that were not available with
>> previous versions (you needed to install them separately by
>> yourself).  If you don't want the optional libraries, you don't have
>> to install them.
>>
>>> I'm just embarking on the task of updating it for 25.1, and wanted to
>>> know if the old style binaries were just temporarily missing or gone
>>> forever.
>>
>> What are "the old style binaries"?

The "old style" was what the old "install.bat" used to produce, before
you (Eli) reconciled the Windows build with the autotools build used
elsewhere.

Of course, the "old" and "new" builds are equally "native", and both
are/were made with MinGW. The most obvious difference is the
more unix-like directory structure (and the lack of a load-path
directory outside the installation directory by default -- not that I'm
complaining). Perhaps the OP was misled by that difference, and
mistakenly inferred that the end-product binary depends on
something like MSYS or Cygwin.

>>> One question about the mingw32 emacs binary: is it like the Cygwin
>>> emacs binary where it uses Cygwin mounts?  What I liked about the
>>> native (MSVC) compiled emacs was that it used C:\... instead of /c/...

Without wishing to confuse matters, there /is/ an Emacs that's
"native to MSYS" and uses MSYS-style mounts, but it's a different
beast. The MSYS package repository has three builds:

mingw32/mingw-w64-i686-emacs 25.1-1
mingw64/mingw-w64-x86_64-emacs 25.1-1
msys/emacs 25.1-1

The first two are native (to Windows) and are hardly patched from
upstream. They're very similar to the official FSF builds for Windows.
The third is "native to MSYS". Most people don't need it but it can
come in handy if you spend time in MSYS.

>> No, MinGW produces native Windows executables.