XEmacs as a Cygwin64 package.

[Dan Harkless]

On 6/29/2025 9:43 AM, Eliot Moss wrote:
> On 6/29/2025 12:01 PM, Aidan Kehoe via Cygwin wrote:
>>
>> Dear Cygwin,
>>
>> I am the maintainer of XEmacs; I have recently made a beta release 
>> and that
>> beta release has no complication or exection problems that are 
>> specifically
>> related to 64-bit Cygwin.
>>
>> Dan Harkless advises me that there is no current 64-bit Cygwin XEmacs 
>> package
>> and that a 32-bit Cygwin XEmacs package remains available. Is there 
>> someone
>> who might be interested in maintaining a 64-bit Cygwin XEmacs? If 
>> not, I am
>> happy to take that on.
>
> Dear Aidan - Would you *prefer* to do it yourself, or be at least as 
> happy
> if someone else takes it on?
>
> Is there a current maintainer for 32-bit XEmacs?  That person might be
> logical to support 64-bit as well.

To be clear, "32-bit" was a modifier to "Cygwin", not to "XEmacs".  
There are no more 32-bit Cygwin maintainers, because it's been 
discontinued, no?  That being said, I downloaded the Cygwin list 
archives so I could find the last time I asked about this on the list.  
It was in 2021, after the xemacs package for 64-bit Cygwin had been 
dropped, but before support for 32-bit Cygwin ended (the following 
year).  Reportedly, XEmacs was having build problems on 64-bit Cygwin.  
When I asked for more info on that, here's the response that was sent:

     From: Henry S. Thompson
     Date: Thu, 28 Oct 2021 09:47:10 +0100
     Subject: [HEADSUP] Phasing out old Windows versions and 32 bit support
      [XEmacs for 64-bit?]
     In-Reply-To: <dc5fd4c5-62a9-2e27-0425-274be9f1d141@gmail.com> (Dan 
Harkless
      via Cygwin's message of "Wed\, 27 Oct 2021 15\:36\:45 -0700")
     References: <YXhrJUHpQ+VvO8Xj@calimero.vinschen.de>
      <dc5fd4c5-62a9-2e27-0425-274be9f1d141@gmail.com>
     Message-ID: <f5ba6itv8mp.fsf@ecclerig.inf.ed.ac.uk>

     Dan Harkless via Cygwin writes:
     > ...
     > Anyone know more about the difficulty in getting those packages to
     > work on 64-bit?

     Um, yes, I did a lot of work on that back in 2015 and got it working
     under Cygwin, with a lot of help from Vin Shelton, but never to the
     point of public release because it _only_ compiled with gcc, not with
     native Windows C tool chain.

     I still use it every day, it crashes about once a week.  Given the
     demise of 32-bit, I'll try to get back to it some time in the next few
     months, but there's other stuff in the queue ahead of that...

     ht
     --
            Henry S. Thompson, School of Informatics, University of 
Edinburgh

Untarring the most recent XEmacs package for 32-bit Cygwin, I see that 
its maintainer as of 2015-04-23 was not Henry or Vin, but Dr. Volker 
Zell from Oracle.

> On a somewhat different tack: Is XEmacs now being more actively 
> developed?
> Web commentary from four years ago suggested that its development pretty
> much stopped ...  [Note: Certainly not intending to step into the middle
> of any contention about Emacs vs XEmacs!]
>
> Regards - Eliot Moss

I'll let Aidan respond as to what the current outlook is, but there was 
a beta version of XEmacs 21.5 released in 2023, and then another beta 
this month.  Per the release notes:

     http://xemacs.org/Releases/21.5.36.html

Kurt Geisel got it compiling again under Visual Studio.  I didn't 
personally try compiling it with a Microsoft toolchain; I'd forgotten 
that it wasn't gcc compilation that was at issue.  The successful build 
I tried was with the native Cygwin 64-bit toolchain.

Thanks.

--
Dan Harkless
https://harkless.org/dan/