Emacs binaries for Windows

[Arash Esbati]

Hi all,

I know this topic has been discussed in past and my apologies in advance
if I'm beating the dead horse again and a longish message.  I'm raising
this question after seeing some queries again about availability of
Emacs on Windows (possibly incl. all necessary libraries (DLLs)).

While building Emacs on Windows with Msys2/MinGW-w64 is quite straight
forward, the main issue is providing the sources of the libraries when
DLLs should be provided as well.  I wrote a simple script to determine
the dependencies of the required packages mentioned here:

    http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/emacs.git/tree/nt/INSTALL.W64#n60

It downloads the original sources mentioned in every PKGBUILD file and
includes patches from here:

    https://github.com/Alexpux/MINGW-packages

Resulting in:

    -> du -hc *.tar.gz
    780K    mingw-w64-bzip2-1.0.6-5.src.tar.gz
    36M     mingw-w64-cairo-1.15.2-2.src.tar.gz
    400K    mingw-w64-expat-2.1.1-1.src.tar.gz
    1.6M    mingw-w64-fontconfig-2.12.0-2.src.tar.gz
    1.8M    mingw-w64-freetype-2.6.5-1.src.tar.gz
    95M     mingw-w64-gcc-6.1.0-2.src.tar.gz
    2.6M    mingw-w64-gdk-pixbuf2-2.35.1-1.src.tar.gz
    19M     mingw-w64-gettext-0.19.7-1.src.tar.gz
    628K    mingw-w64-giflib-5.1.4-1.src.tar.gz
    7.2M    mingw-w64-glib2-2.48.1-1.src.tar.gz
    1.9M    mingw-w64-gmp-6.1.1-1.src.tar.gz
    6.6M    mingw-w64-gnutls-3.5.2-1.src.tar.gz
    3.5M    mingw-w64-graphite2-1.3.8-4.src.tar.gz
    1.3M    mingw-w64-harfbuzz-1.2.7-2.src.tar.gz
    1.4M    mingw-w64-jasper-1.900.1-4.src.tar.gz
    468K    mingw-w64-libcroco-0.6.11-1.src.tar.gz
    920K    mingw-w64-libffi-3.2.1-4.src.tar.gz
    4.3M    mingw-w64-libiconv-1.14-5.src.tar.gz
    3.4M    mingw-w64-libidn-1.32-3.src.tar.gz
    1.5M    mingw-w64-libjpeg-turbo-1.4.2-2.src.tar.gz
    936K    mingw-w64-libpng-1.6.21-1.src.tar.gz
    552K    mingw-w64-librsvg-2.40.16-1.src.tar.gz
    220K    mingw-w64-libsystre-1.0.1-2.src.tar.gz
    1.8M    mingw-w64-libtasn1-4.8-1.src.tar.gz
    2.1M    mingw-w64-libtiff-4.0.6-1.src.tar.gz
    396K    mingw-w64-libtre-git-r122.c2f5d13-4.src.tar.gz
    5.2M    mingw-w64-libxml2-2.9.4-1.src.tar.gz
    584K    mingw-w64-lzo2-2.09-2.src.tar.gz
    1.8M    mingw-w64-nettle-3.2-1.src.tar.gz
    1012K   mingw-w64-p11-kit-0.23.2-2.src.tar.gz
    1.1M    mingw-w64-pango-1.40.1-1.src.tar.gz
    1.5M    mingw-w64-pcre-8.38-2.src.tar.gz
    724K    mingw-w64-pixman-0.34.0-2.src.tar.gz
    92K     mingw-w64-wineditline-2.101-4.src.tar.gz
    30M     mingw-w64-winpthreads-git-5.0.0.4670.00cda6f-1.src.tar.gz
    144K    mingw-w64-xpm-nox-4.2.0-4.src.tar.gz
    1.4M    mingw-w64-xz-5.2.2-1.src.tar.gz
    1.5M    mingw-w64-zlib-1.2.8-9.src.tar.gz
    239M    total

Is this a way to go for Emacs?

Personally, I recommend another approach where only Msys2 package
directories (which Emacs was built against) are provided and downloading
and packaging can be done when a developer/user wants to have it, e.g.:

    cd mingw-w64-bzip2
    makepkg-mingw --allsource -sLf

This is actually what my script does.  Collecting all directories for
the packages above gives:

    -> du -h emacs-25.1-rc1-libs.tar.xz
    464K    emacs-25.1-rc1-libs.tar.xz

Does this approach comply with GPL?

Best, Arash