RE: [External] : emacs-28 windows binaries available from alpha

[Drew Adams]

> Thanks Drew.

You're welcome.  Thanks for producing Windows binaries.
 
> I wasn't able to reproduce before you sent this, in so much as the elc
> file you had attached loaded for me locally under Emacs 28 without
> issue.  Now that I see we're invoking the native compiler I can try
> also on the no-MSYS machine where I've been pre-testing the pre-test
> packages ;)
> 
> Just to confirm:
> 1. does the machine where this occurs have MSYS including libgccjib
> and gcc, and if so

No idea, but most likely not.  It's not a software
development laptop.  No gcc or other C compiler,
for sure.

> 2. is bin folder of that MSYS installation on your path?

No MSYS, most likely.

> As I strongly suspect you know: We aren't providing libgccjib+gcc with
> the Emacs 28 distributions, at least we haven't decided to do that so
> far.

No, I don't know.  And I don't know what libgccjib+gcc
is, or why I would want or need it on my laptop.

I also don't understand, if Emacs native compiling
tries to use existing *.elc files, why it doesn't
fall back to using the *.el, if trying to compile
natively from the *.elc raises an error.

IOW, in the case of this small Elisp file, why would
Emacs depend on using a *.elc if present, and simply
give up if trying to use it raises an error.  The
source of truth is (should be) *.el, not *.elc.

I can maybe understand that starting with a *.elc
might be a useful shortcut of some kind, but why
should an error with a *.elc - especially of the
sort that some compiling tool etc. isn't available
- prohibit using an Emacs binary?  Since when
should an Emacs binary depend on such things?

If it's no longer possible to use a Windows binary
unless you have such development tools installed,
then Emacs 28 and later will be useless, for me at
least.

> Appreciate the backtrace; I'll reply again when 
> I can attempt testing in a sans-MSYS environment.

I take that as a hopeful sign that the _intention_
is not to require dev tools such as gcc, msys etc.
to be present on the machine where I use an Emacs
binary.

If that's the intention then great, and I wish you
good luck getting past this hurdle.  Sorry to be
the bearer of the bad news that there are some
Emacs users who don't use software dev tools.

Maybe that will ultimately mean that such users
must forego being able to use natively compiled
code?  If so, that's OK by me - no worse than before.

It's likely that some of what I just wrote betrays
false assumptions or misunderstandings on my part.
I haven't been following the attempt to provide
native compilation.