Emacs build on Windows: Prerequisites

Emacs build on Windows: Prerequisites

[dhruva]

Hi,
 I have been building emacs on windows so far with no issues as I had
all the required executables in place.
 I had to move to a new machine and realized that I did not have some
of the UNIX shell utilities (ex: cp, rm..) on my windows box.
 Why should Emacs build on windows need those tools? Why can't it use
the windows equivalents? This will make it easier for me to build. Is
there any particular reason to make the availability of the UNIX
commands mandatory?

with best regards,
dhruva

-- 
Dhruva Krishnamurthy
Contents reflect my personal views only!

Re: Emacs build on Windows: Prerequisites

[David Kastrup]

dhruva <dhruvakm@gmail.com> writes:

> I have been building emacs on windows so far with no issues as I had
> all the required executables in place.
> I had to move to a new machine and realized that I did not have some
> of the UNIX shell utilities (ex: cp, rm..) on my windows box.
> Why should Emacs build on windows need those tools? Why can't it use
> the windows equivalents?

Because in many cases there aren't such equivalents?

> This will make it easier for me to build.

Will it make it easier for the developers to maintain, in particular
synchronizing it with the builds on other platforms?  The developers
of the Windows port will be more qualified to answer this question
than I am, but I still want to point out that at least I find the
phrasing of your request coming across as somewhat self-centred.  A
progression of the "Why should...", "Why can't it..." kind comes
across like a complaint doubting the sanity of the addressed people's
choices.  Whether or not that was your intent, it probably could have
been phrased in a more constructive manner.

In any way, running Emacs without a suitable toolset around it is not
much fun even under Windows.  So another question would be whether
such benefits would not be shortlived.  Add to that that the build
environment will require a complete set of compilation tools, anyway.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum

Re: Emacs build on Windows: Prerequisites

[dhruva]

On 2/28/07, David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org> wrote:
> dhruva <dhruvakm@gmail.com> writes:

> > This will make it easier for me to build.
>
> Will it make it easier for the developers to maintain, in particular
> synchronizing it with the builds on other platforms?  The developers
> of the Windows port will be more qualified to answer this question
> than I am, but I still want to point out that at least I find the
> phrasing of your request coming across as somewhat self-centred.  A

I apologize for conveying something that I did not mean. Just a
communication gap. IMHO, since Emacs is distributed in source form,
there will be lot of people trying to build it. Hence, I was hoping to
reduce the dependency and make it a little easier to be able to build
on windows. It was not an attempt to complain nor criticize the
current setup but a genuine approach to make it more self contained.

> progression of the "Why should...", "Why can't it..." kind comes
> across like a complaint doubting the sanity of the addressed people's
> choices.  Whether or not that was your intent, it probably could have

Not complaining for sure. Before I start modifying the build files, I
wanted to know if there was a reason that I had completely missed out.
I just wanted to avoid spending time on a topic which was already
visited by other developers.

with best regards,
dhruva

-- 
Dhruva Krishnamurthy
Contents reflect my personal views only!

Emacs build on Windows: Prerequisites

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

dhruva writes:

 > Hi,
 >  I have been building emacs on windows so far with no issues as I had
 > all the required executables in place.
 >  I had to move to a new machine and realized that I did not have some
 > of the UNIX shell utilities (ex: cp, rm..) on my windows box.

Indeed, that is annoying.

 >  Why should Emacs build on windows need those tools? Why can't it use
 > the windows equivalents?

Because they're not equivalent.  They are by and large much less
powerful, with idiosyncratic syntax that often does not mix well with
scripts and idiosyncratic semantics such as rather low limits on
number of command line arguments, causing mysterious build failures.
They also do not stay the same across Windows versions.  I haven't
heard of them changing across SPs in Windows XP, but indeed some of
the utilities lost options or changed their spelling across SPs in
both Windows 2000 and Windows NT.

 > This will make it easier for me to build.

That has not been our experience at XEmacs.  Easier for the users,
perhaps.  But that came at a high cost in developer and tester time, a
cost you will bear alone.

Be that as it may, other users and the Emacs developers will be less
able (and possibly less willing) to provide assistance if perchance
you have some difficulty in building.  I don't think you really come
out ahead on the deal.  YMMV, of course.

 > Is there any particular reason to make the availability of the UNIX
 > commands mandatory?

It's free software, nothing is mandatory except the license under
which you redistribute, if you do.<wink>

However, many Emacs functions depend on running utilities, and you
will find aspell, diff, patch, ... in the same place that you find the
fileutils.  I wouldn't be surprised if dired works better with ls than
with dir, and so on and so forth.  Having the usual suite of utilities
is likely to make your Emacs experience much more enjoyable.

BTW, IMO David is too sensitive; your post was quite reasonable,
especially given the well-known policy of Emacs to give precedence to
support for free platforms.  However, AFAICS it's not a question here
of regretfully allocating scarces resources away from support for
native Windows solutions; it's simply better all around to ask Windows
users to spend a few minutes and a few megabytes downloading and
installing the standard utilities from Cygwin or MSYS.

Re: Emacs build on Windows: Prerequisites

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Wed, 28 Feb 2007 18:28:54 +0530
> From: dhruva <dhruvakm@gmail.com>
> 
>  Why should Emacs build on windows need those tools? Why can't it use
> the windows equivalents?

We could use the equivalent Windows commands, but doing so would
complicate the build process and its maintenance a great deal.  The
reason for this is that different versions of Windows provide very
different features in the same commands.  While the latest versions of
Windows, starting from W2K, come with quite powerful features in both
the stock shell cmd.exe (including its built-in commands and) and in
external commands such as XCOPY, older Windows versions (9x/ME) still
use command.com, which is much less powerful, and the external
commands that come with them are extremely rudimentary.  NT4 has
cmd.exe, but it lacks many features we have on W2K and XP.  I cannot
describe all the features missing from older Windows, but here are
just a few examples:

  . The shell always returns a zero exit status, even if the
    command(s) it ran failed.

  . Batch files always return zero exit status, and their output
    cannot be redirected.

  . There's no shell syntax to redirect stderr.

  . COPY will silently fail to copy empty files, and will sometimes
    fail to copy binary files.

  . MOVE, the equivalent of mv, is sometimes a built-in, sometimes an
    external command, and sometimes absent, and its features vary from
    one Windows version to another.

  . DEL, the equivalent of rm, doesn't have an option to do the
    equivalent of "rm -rf".

etc., etc.

Since we still support building Emacs on the older versions of
Windows, we cannot rely on features that those versions lack.  Perhaps
in a few years, we could, in principle, abandon ported cp, rm, and mv,
and switch to using the Windows equivalents, but even then someone
will have to step forward and volunteer to do the job of making the
changes, testing them, and convincing the rest that it's a good idea
to fix what ain't broken.  After all, it's highly unlikely that Emacs
users who build Emacs themselves will not have GNU Fileutils installed
on their machines anyway.

Re: Emacs build on Windows: Prerequisites

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: "Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@xemacs.org>
> Date: Thu, 01 Mar 2007 01:55:46 +0900
> Cc: Emacs Devel <emacs-devel@gnu.org>
> 
>  >  Why should Emacs build on windows need those tools? Why can't it use
>  > the windows equivalents?
> 
> Because they're not equivalent.  They are by and large much less
> powerful, with idiosyncratic syntax that often does not mix well with
> scripts and idiosyncratic semantics such as rather low limits on
> number of command line arguments, causing mysterious build failures.

That was so in the past, but Windows versions since W2K on don't have
these limitations, and the equivalent commands are as powerful as the
Posix ones.  However, we still support the older versions of Windows.

Re: Emacs build on Windows: Prerequisites

[Jason Rumney]

dhruva wrote:
> Before I start modifying the build files, I
> wanted to know if there was a reason that I had completely missed out.
> I just wanted to avoid spending time on a topic which was already
> visited by other developers.
>
There are a couple of paragraphs of commentary in nt/gmake.defs about 
why past maintainers chose to require cp and rm to build Emacs rather 
than use the Windows native del and copy commands.

Re: Emacs build on Windows: Prerequisites

[dhruva]

Hi,
 Thank you all for the inputs. I agree it is much simpler to download
some extra tools and get the build going.

The following are some of the packages I downloaded to get the whole
thing going:

For building Emacs on Windows (release/pretest versions):
http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/coreutils.htm
To build the info files (from CVS):
http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/texinfo.htm

Tools needed by Emacs (optional to get a full blown setup):
http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/diffutils.htm
http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/tar.htm
http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/sed.htm
http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/gzip.htm
http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/grep.htm

with best regards,
dhruva

-- 
Dhruva Krishnamurthy
Contents reflect my personal views only!

Re: Emacs build on Windows: Prerequisites

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Wed, 28 Feb 2007 22:05:41 +0000
> From: Jason Rumney <jasonr@gnu.org>
> Cc: Emacs Devel <emacs-devel@gnu.org>
> 
> There are a couple of paragraphs of commentary in nt/gmake.defs about 
> why past maintainers chose to require cp and rm to build Emacs rather 
> than use the Windows native del and copy commands.

Some of those reasons are also a thing of the past.  For example,
latest versions of GNU Make do support setting SHELL to cmd.exe.  But
backslashes in file names is still sometimes an issue, even though
quoting file names solves that in some cases.

Re: Emacs build on Windows: Prerequisites

[Lennart Borgman (gmail)]

dhruva wrote:
> Hi,
> Thank you all for the inputs. I agree it is much simpler to download
> some extra tools and get the build going.
> 
> The following are some of the packages I downloaded to get the whole
> thing going:
> 
> For building Emacs on Windows (release/pretest versions):
> http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/coreutils.htm
> To build the info files (from CVS):
> http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/texinfo.htm
> 
> Tools needed by Emacs (optional to get a full blown setup):
> http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/diffutils.htm
> http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/tar.htm
> http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/sed.htm
> http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/gzip.htm
> http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/grep.htm
> 
> with best regards,
> dhruva

Thanks. Did you see the page about building Emacs on w32 here:

  http://ourcomments.org/Emacs/w32-build-emacs.html

Do you have some comments about that page? Maybe your list is a good 
summary for some things there?

With the Emacs+EmacsW32 distro comes some of the GnuWin32 utilities. Do 
you have any opinion about what to include there?

Re: Emacs build on Windows: Prerequisites

[Vinicius Jose Latorre]

dhruva wrote:
> Hi,
> Thank you all for the inputs. I agree it is much simpler to download
> some extra tools and get the build going.
>
> The following are some of the packages I downloaded to get the whole
> thing going:
>
> For building Emacs on Windows (release/pretest versions):
> http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/coreutils.htm
> To build the info files (from CVS):
> http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/texinfo.htm
>
> Tools needed by Emacs (optional to get a full blown setup):
> http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/diffutils.htm
> http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/tar.htm
> http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/sed.htm
> http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/gzip.htm
> http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/grep.htm
>
> with best regards,
> dhruva

The link:

     http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/windows/ntemacs.html

Has also a lot of informations about Emacs for Windows.

It has also links to download pre-compiled distributions for Windows.


Vinicius

Re: Emacs build on Windows: Prerequisites

[Lennart Borgman (gmail)]

Vinicius Jose Latorre wrote:
> dhruva wrote:
>> Hi,
>> Thank you all for the inputs. I agree it is much simpler to download
>> some extra tools and get the build going.
>>
>> The following are some of the packages I downloaded to get the whole
>> thing going:
>>
>> For building Emacs on Windows (release/pretest versions):
>> http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/coreutils.htm
>> To build the info files (from CVS):
>> http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/texinfo.htm
>>
>> Tools needed by Emacs (optional to get a full blown setup):
>> http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/diffutils.htm
>> http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/tar.htm
>> http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/sed.htm
>> http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/gzip.htm
>> http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/grep.htm
>>
>> with best regards,
>> dhruva
> 
> The link:
> 
>     http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/windows/ntemacs.html
> 
> Has also a lot of informations about Emacs for Windows.
> 
> It has also links to download pre-compiled distributions for Windows.


Isn't there a newer version of this that also mentions precompiled 
binaries for Emacs 22, the beta test version?

I tried browsing the web page repositories at
http://savannah.gnu.org/project/memberlist.php?group=emacs
but I found nothing about Emacs 22 there. Is not that strange?

For information about precompiled binaries on MS Windows there is 
however information on EmacsWiki:

http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/CategoryWThirtyTwo

Re: Emacs build on Windows: Prerequisites

[Vinicius Jose Latorre]

Lennart Borgman (gmail) wrote:
>
> I tried browsing the web page repositories at
> http://savannah.gnu.org/project/memberlist.php?group=emacs
> but I found nothing about Emacs 22 there. Is not that strange?

The link above points to the Emacs developer member list.

The Emacs page is

      http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/emacs/

What exactly is strange?

Re: Emacs build on Windows: Prerequisites

[Lennart Borgman (gmail)]

Vinicius Jose Latorre wrote:
> Lennart Borgman (gmail) wrote:
>>
>> I tried browsing the web page repositories at
>> http://savannah.gnu.org/project/memberlist.php?group=emacs
>> but I found nothing about Emacs 22 there. Is not that strange?
> 
> The link above points to the Emacs developer member list.
> 
> The Emacs page is
> 
>      http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/emacs/
> 
> What exactly is strange?

I was looking at the web pages repository for the MS Windows FAQ. The 
pages there all seems to say Emacs 21.3, not Emacs 22. I see however 
that they were updated last time some months ago and I guess that 
Ramprasad have not had time to do more than he did then.

Ah, and I see you are also doing some work on that part. Thanks.

Re: Emacs build on Windows: Prerequisites

[Vinicius Jose Latorre]

Lennart Borgman (gmail) wrote:
>
> I was looking at the web pages repository for the MS Windows FAQ. The 
> pages there all seems to say Emacs 21.3, not Emacs 22. I see however 
> that they were updated last time some months ago and I guess that 
> Ramprasad have not had time to do more than he did then.

Well, to best of my knowledge, there is only pre-compiled "stable" 
version distribution, that is, Emacs 19, 20 and 21.3 (the last "stable" 
version).

There is no pre-compiled "testing" distribution, that is, Emacs 22 or 23.

I think that after Emacs 22 release there will be a pre-compiled version 
for Windows.

Humm, did you see the link:

      
http://derekslager.com/blog/posts/2007/01/emacs-hack-3-compile-emacs-from-cvs-on-windows.ashx

??

It seems useful for Emacs (22 or 23) installation for Windows.

Re: Emacs build on Windows: Prerequisites

[Lennart Borgman (gmail)]

Vinicius Jose Latorre wrote:
> Lennart Borgman (gmail) wrote:
>>
>> I was looking at the web pages repository for the MS Windows FAQ. The 
>> pages there all seems to say Emacs 21.3, not Emacs 22. I see however 
>> that they were updated last time some months ago and I guess that 
>> Ramprasad have not had time to do more than he did then.
> 
> Well, to best of my knowledge, there is only pre-compiled "stable" 
> version distribution, that is, Emacs 19, 20 and 21.3 (the last "stable" 
> version).
> 
> There is no pre-compiled "testing" distribution, that is, Emacs 22 or 23.
> 
> I think that after Emacs 22 release there will be a pre-compiled version 
> for Windows.
> 
> Humm, did you see the link:
> 
>      
> http://derekslager.com/blog/posts/2007/01/emacs-hack-3-compile-emacs-from-cvs-on-windows.ashx 
> 
> 
> ??
> 
> It seems useful for Emacs (22 or 23) installation for Windows.

Ehum, and as someone wrote in a comment on that blog page some days ago 
there are binary builds available on the net. They are not official, but 
I at least upload a binary built from CVS immediately after Chong 
releases the pretest tarballs.

There is a special page on EmacsWiki which has links to different 
prebuilt binaries of CVS Emacs:

   http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/CategoryWThirtyTwo

And on the page

   http://ourcomments.org/Emacs/w32-build-emacs.html

there have been instructions similar to those on that blog page for long 
time now. (But it includes quite a bit more since I did a lot of 
learning and testing at the time I wrote it.)

Re: Emacs build on Windows: Prerequisites

[Vinicius Jose Latorre]

Lennart Borgman (gmail) wrote:
> Vinicius Jose Latorre wrote:
>> Well, to best of my knowledge, there is only pre-compiled "stable" 
>> version distribution, that is, Emacs 19, 20 and 21.3 (the last 
>> "stable" version).
>>
>> There is no pre-compiled "testing" distribution, that is, Emacs 22 or 
>> 23.
>>
>> I think that after Emacs 22 release there will be a pre-compiled 
>> version for Windows.
>>
>> Humm, did you see the link:
>>
>>      
>> http://derekslager.com/blog/posts/2007/01/emacs-hack-3-compile-emacs-from-cvs-on-windows.ashx 
>>
>>
>> ??
>>
>> It seems useful for Emacs (22 or 23) installation for Windows.
>
> Ehum, and as someone wrote in a comment on that blog page some days 
> ago there are binary builds available on the net. They are not 
> official, but I at least upload a binary built from CVS immediately 
> after Chong releases the pretest tarballs.

Hmmm, yeah, now I see it (http://ourcomments.org/Emacs/EmacsW32.html).  
Good!

Re: Emacs build on Windows: Prerequisites

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Fri, 02 Mar 2007 21:10:08 +0100
> From: "Lennart Borgman (gmail)" <lennart.borgman@gmail.com>
> Cc: Emacs Devel <emacs-devel@gnu.org>, Jason Rumney <jasonr@gnu.org>
> >      
> > http://derekslager.com/blog/posts/2007/01/emacs-hack-3-compile-emacs-from-cvs-on-windows.ashx 
> > 
> > 
> > ??
> > 
> > It seems useful for Emacs (22 or 23) installation for Windows.
> [...]
> And on the page
> 
>    http://ourcomments.org/Emacs/w32-build-emacs.html
> 
> there have been instructions similar to those on that blog page for long 
> time now. (But it includes quite a bit more since I did a lot of 
> learning and testing at the time I wrote it.)

Lennart, may I suggest that you show respect for work done by others
as much as you respect yours?  Your page doesn't say a word about
building Emacs with MSVC, while the page cited above explains both
MinGW and MSVC builds.  So your last sentence above is not really
accurate, IMO.

Re: Emacs build on Windows: Prerequisites

[Lennart Borgman (gmail)]

Eli Zaretskii wrote:
>> Date: Fri, 02 Mar 2007 21:10:08 +0100
>> From: "Lennart Borgman (gmail)" <lennart.borgman@gmail.com>
>> Cc: Emacs Devel <emacs-devel@gnu.org>, Jason Rumney <jasonr@gnu.org>
>>>      
>>> http://derekslager.com/blog/posts/2007/01/emacs-hack-3-compile-emacs-from-cvs-on-windows.ashx 
...
> Lennart, may I suggest that you show respect for work done by others
> as much as you respect yours?  Your page doesn't say a word about
> building Emacs with MSVC, while the page cited above explains both
> MinGW and MSVC builds.  So your last sentence above is not really
> accurate, IMO.

Sorry, it was not my meaning to be disrespectful to Derek Slager who I 
have reasons to believe knows quite a bit more than me about compiling 
Emacs. In afterthought it might have been better to comment to Vinicius 
of list of course. I hope I did not hurt neither Derek nor Vinicius.