Re: windows installer

[phillip.lord@russet.org.uk (Phillip Lord)]

Drew Adams <drew.adams@oracle.com> writes:
> Such binaries used to be delivered more often.  If there
> were a simple "push-button" command to create them locally,
> which didn't require anything else, I might well take
> advantage of that too.

It's not going to get any simpler than "./configure;make install"
complete with all the environment that this entails.


>>> But this installer is not for people like you or me who know what they
>> are doing and have special needs and requirements.
>
> OK.  (But I do not know what I am doing wrt building Emacs
> on Windows - I don't do that.)
>
> My only "special needs and requirements" is the
> ability to put the equivalent of what the delivered
> Windows zip for a binary provides in any folder.
>
>> It is primarily for the naïve (a.k.a. "newbie") who just want to be
>> able to invoke the installer and get Emacs installed "correctly",
>> meaning that Emacs is available to any other program running on the
>> system.  And that means being installed where other programs are
>> installed (which gives them additional protection by system-wide
>> processes and features), and being on PATH.
>
> That's fine.  But is it not the case that this "installer"
> also _builds_ Emacs for Windows?  If not then apologies
> for misunderstanding.

No. The builder builds the installer. It's a self-extracting zip file on
steroids.


> If so, wouldn't that be a good thing?  Folks who don't
> want to hassle with obtaining and installing whatever
> tooling is necessary to build Emacs could build it
> easily and so might follow Emacs development more
> closely, potentially providing more timely feedback.
>
> Just a thought.  As it is now, I wait until there is
> a pretest or release before seeing what has changed
> and reporting problems or offering suggestions.

I think we are good here. I put support for snapshot building in, and
I've automated as much of the stuff around that as I can. So, I should
be able to do it more frequently; probably monthly, as I haven't managed
to automate things from start to finish.

So, not quite what you want in that you will need to install msys to do
the build, but at least it will be easier for someone else to do it for
you, if you don't wish to do this.

Phil