Hello.
Here's something I would like to propose for inclusion into GNU
Emacs early on, before it gets any contributors that didn't assign
copyrights to FSF.
Ladies and gentlemen, presenting emacs-win-builder, an Elisp
script for building Emacs on Windows. Currently I published it here.
The general idea is very simple. You start with only wget
installed and Emacs sources, run a single function and get a new
version of Emacs built for you. This installs the appropriate
toolchain(MinGW and Msys2 are both supported), then goes through
the whole autogen -> configure -> make -> make install
cycle.
I believe this would save some time, both for maintainers of Emacs
on Windows and general users. This also allows Emacs developers to
keep the build procedure as complex as required, without having to
worry about making it too hard for users to follow. Also, this
lowers the dependency on any toolchain, since we can always add
some of our own patches or non standard versions of packages into
the process(MinGW build already uses quite few of them). People
who want to hack around the build process would always have a
working place to start from. Also users would be able to test bug
fixes immediately without having to wait for a third party or the
next RC.
Currently there are a few hacky pats, some parts should be better
documented, but the main build procedure works for every currently
possible build. Out of optional things, for MinGW only gnutls is
currently built, but this is solvable. Also, I'm not so sure on
the versions of MinGW libraries, this needs review from someone
with better knowledge. I haven't thoroughly tested the resulting
builds, but since this script does not do any magic, any possible
problems with them seem solvable.
--
Best Regards,
Nikolay Kudryavtsev