Re: Process to build standalone Emacs + deps in Windows

[Juan José García-Ripoll]

Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> writes:

>> I am trying to debug the process of building a distributable Emacs
>> with dependencies on Windows 64 bits. [...] What are the steps or the
>> scripts used to create the *.zip files that are found in the official
>> repository? Is there a simple guide I can use to reproduce it?
>
> Did you look at the files in admin/nt/ ?

No, I was focused on the 'nt/' folder and did  not expect other
locations. Thanks for the hint.

Now, to motivate my intentions a bit better, I have built Emacs from
savannah's git repository following a different set of instructions
(https://gist.github.com/nauhygon/f3b44f51b34e89bc54f8). These
instructions are hacky (cp /mingw64/bin/*.dll $target/bin).  However,
this seems to work, which shows that, out of the dependencies that Emacs
tracks down during its build process, many can be dropped. The resulting
directory is also leaner

$ du -smc scoop/apps/emacs/26.3 # standard distribution
758     scoop/apps/emacs/26.3
$ du -smc scoop/apps/emacs/27 # from git
207     scoop/apps/emacs/27

The extra space seems to be:
- Executables that come with the linked in libraries, such as
tiff2bw.exe, minizip.exe, imginfo.exe, etc.
- Dependencies that are needed by the libraries in development mode, but
not in actual use, such as the python library brought in by glib,
together with all their associated directories.
- Secondary dependencies of those other libraries, such as tcl/tk
brought in by python (once more, executables, DLL's and supporting
directories)

On a side note, what kind of solution would be acceptable?
- Do we need to keep all the utilities supplied by the libraries Emacs
links to?
- Is a manual filter of second-level dependencies ok?
- Is there a catalogue of utilities that Emacs expect laying around in
the OS? I see the dependencies file contains bzip2.exe, xz.exe and other
tools which are not coming from first-level dependencies.

Finally, I am cleared by the FSF to contribute patches to AucTeX. Would
I require a validation also to contribute fixes to Emacs?

Cheers,

-- 
Juan José García Ripoll

Quantum Information and Foundations Group
http://quinfog.hbar.es - http://juanjose.garciaripoll.com