Re: Making gnulib imports build on Windows

[Andy Moreton <andrewjmoreton@gmail.com>]

On Thu 27 Jan 2011, Eli Zaretskii wrote:

>> From: Andy Moreton <andrewjmoreton@gmail.com>
>> Date: Wed, 26 Jan 2011 22:40:30 +0000
>> 
>> Although Cygwin and MSYS are widely used for building emacs for Windows,
>> I agree that option 2) is the best.
>
> Thanks for the feedback.
>
>> The maintainer-only rules for generating the pre-canned
>> configuration and headers should minimise the doffernces from the
>> standard POSIX makefile infrastructure as far as possible.
>> 
>> In a perfect world, this would allow the use of mingw32 or mingw-w64
>> cross compilers to build Windows emacs binaries on POSIX hosts.
>> 
>> What can I do to help this happen ?
>
> Sorry, I'm not sure I'm following: help what happen?  If you mean
> unbreak the Windows build, then either (a) describing what exactly
> needs to be done for that or (b) actually doing that is what's
> needed.  I'm almost done doing (a) myself, but I can never be sure I
> figured out everything until I actually make the changes and try
> building.

Sorry if I was unclear. Initially the w32 build needs to be repaired,
but the longer term aim should surely be reducing the differences
between w32 build scripts ans the rest of emacs. This includes allowing
for additional toolchains (e.g. Mingw-w64, llvm).

Mingw32 and wingw-w64 cross toolchains are available in some Linux distros. If 
developers on other platforms could at least build the win32 port, it
would make it easier for those developers to check whether their changes
break the w32 build. It might also simplify building tarballs and binary
releases.

    AndyM