Re: emacs-win-builder

[Nikolay Kudryavtsev]

E.g., on my systems, MSYS can only work when invoked from the MSYS Bash window.

That's interesting. What's the possible breaking point here? Assuming that we clear our exec-path, use bash.exe from msys directory and add whatever necessary to the process environment, I could not think of anything that should break here, that's not easily fixable.

Wouldn't it be better to use start-file-process instead?

Yes, I'm planning to fix that. Just wanted to have this ready for testing ASAP.

The list of dependencies to download should IMO be on a separate file.

Was thinking of doing that too. Will do.

The repeated portions of the URLs of the download sites could also be specified only once in that separate file.

Great idea. Gonna implement that.

 Various versions of 7z are not Free Software, so I think we'd prefer to use bsdtar from libarchive instead.

Well, 7z is lGPL 2.1 with unrar exception and IMHO that's one of the cases where having non-free code is ethical. But, I do understand those who disagree. The practical reason why 7z is used there, is that I wanted to limit the need for manual user action. Since 7z is distributed as exe, you can install it from a script. For libarchive we would need some way to extract zip files first. GnuWin provides a setup version of unzip, so I guess that would be one option.

So some other factor is at work here, most probably the download URLs that all end in "/download".

Yep. I missed that sourceforge does a redirect from filename too. Will fix.

install in some staging area, leaving it to the user to copy to the final destination after exiting Emacs.

Or maybe install into staging area, then try to copy to the final destination? Alert when fail. Gonna implement some solution to that end, since this is something that would happen from time to time.

Eli, I also have a couple questions for you and maybe other people who may have that knowledge.

First, what would be some reasonable optimization profiles. I think we all agree that we want to have something with debug information as default. So what would be the best flags here? And then there should be an option to make an optimized build, what would be the best flags for it? Also I do "--enable-checking='yes,glyphs' --enable-check-lisp-object-type" everywhere. Just in case, is keeping those flags everywhere safe? Also, are there any other configure related options we may want to implement?

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Best Regards,
Nikolay Kudryavtsev