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Re: Emacs for Windows


From: Eli Zaretskii
Subject: Re: Emacs for Windows
Date: Sat, 11 Oct 2014 19:48:43 +0300

> From: Óscar Fuentes <ofv@wanadoo.es>
> Date: Sat, 11 Oct 2014 18:18:50 +0200
> 
> > Not every binary distribution they have has the corresponding source
> > distribution.  (Apologies if I missed something, but I really did look
> > and didn't find.)
> 
> Yes, that's something that catched my attention too.
> 
> AFAIK, they provide sources for those packages that belong to them (i.e.
> MSYS2 proper). For the rest, the sources are retrieved from their
> official sites (i.e. gcc) and then local pactches are applied, if any
> exists. This is automated by the Arch Build System (abs for short, that
> was ported to MSYS2.) Any user can retrieve a package's source code by
> using certain abs commands. The local patches are readily available from
> GitHub. If you wish to build the package instead of intalling the
> binaries, then retrieving the sources, applying the local paches,
> building and installing is nicely automated by abs.

Fhew!  And where does one learn about this procedure?

Btw, I reviewed a few patches they have in github for a couple of
packages with which I'm familiar, and either the patches available
through github are not all the story (e.g., perhaps they use some
additional non-default replacements for standard library functions),
or their ports are crippled.  Examples include Guile (which needs to
be heavily patched to work on Windows) and Hunspell (likewise, and one
of the bugs affects Unix as well).

I really wonder whether they run the test suite for each package
before they release it.  Guile, for example, fails the tests miserably
on Windows if not patched.

In addition, at least one package -- Bison 3.0.2 -- has no patches at
all, and no source distro under "Sources", so either it is buggy, or
the patches used to build the binaries were not posted.

> AFAIU this violates the requirement of obtaining the source code from
> the binary code distributor.

Indeed.

Btw, strangely enough, they don't have some very important packages,
like Gawk, Flex, and m4, to name just a few.  Strange collection.




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