[Emacspeak] [SharpWin] Building emacspeak on Windows.

[Robert Melton <lists@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Looking for ideas for how to build emacspeak on Windows.

The core problem is there are small bits of the Makefile, but honestly 
not too much that is incompatible with running it using make on 
Windows. Things like chmod statements, expecting tar to be on the 
machine, etc.

The entire point of SharpWin is you do not need an entire Linux-alike 
system, you could already run a VM or WSL and find ways to build 
emacspeak, but IMHO, the end result is fairly poor. Anyway, not to 
tangent to deep on this, but installing a massive system like 
cygwin or WSL for my purposes does not solve the problem. It just 
creates another one. 

My first attempt was to add various checks for Windows arounds 
incompatible stuff: https://github.com/tvraman/emacspeak/pull/119

Raman rejected it and I don't disagree, it got a little gross.  

So, next I built a little make.ps1 -- which will get less ugly 
if merged into emacspeak, but not zero ugly. Additionally, I 
think C# skills are more likely found in our community than 
Powershell (but correct me if I'm am wrong). In theory this 
could be the build system, it works, but for valid reasons is 
unlikely to be accepted into Emacspeak.

Raman recommended I keep it in one file, I could do basically what I do 
in make.ps1 in like Makefile.windows in the root, and then put a single 
branching statement in to route to Makefile.windows when detected to be
running on Windows.

I really don't like any of the approaches very much, but trying to find 
the most maintainable balance for everyone. 

--
Robert "robertmeta" Melton
lists@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx <mailto:lists@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>