Re: [feature/dll-only-windows] A new windows build, comments wanted

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Phillip Lord <phillip.lord@russet.org.uk>
> Date: Sat, 09 Jan 2021 19:57:00 +0000
> 
> So I have tried a new technique which is now on
> feature/dll-only-windows. Essentially, I just name all of the DLLs that
> Emacs uses directly and then figure out any dependencies of these using
> `ntldd`. I've tried `ntldd` directly on emacs.exe which does not
> work.

Of course, it won't: we load all the DLLs dynamically at run time, we
don't link against their import libraries.  The only exceptions I know
of are (1) GMP, and (2) libgccjit (in the native-comp build).

> The practical upshot of this is that the dependencies file is just
> a pile of DLLs.

Did you verify that the DLLs include all of _their_ dependencies?  If
yes, how did you do that?

> 2) harfbuzz is currently not working on i686.

Is that a bug in the MinGW64 HarfBuzz port, or is that a bug in Emacs?
I'm using a 32-bit Emacs build with HarfBuzz all the time, but it's
HarfBuzz I built myself (it's available from the ezwinports site).

> Before I fix this, I think it is worth asking whether I still need
> to produce a i686 binary.

I cannot tell you what to do, but it would be nice to have binaries
that can be run on older Windows versions.  So if the build supports
XP and older Windows, keeping the 32-bit build would be an advantage.

> 3) Currently the "no-deps" version actually includes libXpm. Emacs
> starts without it, but looks ugly. I would like to no longer special
> case libXpm and just make the "no-deps" download really include no
> deps. I think this is reasonable, because this download is now, really
> special purpose and "with-deps" is the default.

If we believe no one will want the no-deps download, why have it at
all?  If we think someone will want it, I don't think they should be
punished by having BW icons on the tool bar.

> 4) Currently, native-comp is an "--with-nativecomp" option even on the
> native-comp branch. It is likely to be merged this way to master?

Yes, I think so.

> Currently, I build the Windows distribution of Emacs with all the
> default options.

Which non-default options of practical importance does that leave out?

> I can make an alternative release "--with-nativecomp" but needs some
> effort; it also does not address the question of how I should build
> Emacs for Windows when a full release of Emacs-28 happens. If, the
> full release of Emacs-28 will be native-comp, I'd rather start
> building snapshots with it as soon as it is merged.

I think you should build --with-nativecomp.  People can always
uninstall libgccjit or rename it if they don't want to use native
compilation.

> 5) Why is it "--with-nativecomp", shouldn't it be "--with-native-comp".

Probably, but we didn't yet get to splitting such thin hair in that
branch ;-)