Try building from source

[xparq]

Just to have a feel of the cost, general robustness of the build setup etc.

Building from source

Source = the .zip from the GH mirror, which apparently means the relevant guide is INSTALL.REPO, not INSTALL!

Vanilla build at first, no options (like --with-modules etc., only the prefix to install in /opt/emacs), just to have a feel.
UPDATE: It's massive, as expected... Took ~half an hour on my old Toshiba laptop, and 10-15 min on my dev server.

Linux (WSL Debian 12)

1. For configure to succeed, I ran (partly as per the messy build page of the Emacs Wiki, partly as per the errors make configure and then configure gave):

   sudo apt install libc6-dev libjpeg62-turbo libncurses5-dev libpng-dev libwebp-dev libtiff5-dev libgif-dev xaw3dg-dev zlib1g-dev libx11-dev texinfo libcairo-dev gnutls-bin gnutls-dev

   Note: no makeinfo, no gnutls pkg, and libcairo defaults to cairo2. Also, since this is a dev. host, a bunch of X-related and other libs have already been installed!

   Also had to add libxpm-dev libgif-dev libtiff-dev on my dev server! And --with-gnutls=ifavailable, because couldn't install that one for some reason...

2.1. To go ahead and build (with configure options, as needed, e.g. --with-tree-sitter --with-small-ja-dic):

make configure="--prefix=/opt/emacs CFLAGS='-O2 -g'"

Note: --with-native-compilation requires libgccjit-dev, but I couldn't even find the package name for my Deb11 server...)

2.2. Or... For more control, like building in a separate dir outside the repo:

./autogen.sh # to generate `configure`
cd ..
mkdir build.tmp && cd build.tmp

3. ../emacs-master/configure --prefix=/opt/emacs, or more, e.g. this on my Deb11 dev server:

   ./configure --prefix=/opt/emacs --with-gnutls=ifavailable --with-tree-sitter --with-native-compilation --with-small-ja-dic

4. make install -> ~150 MB to /opt/emacs, most of which is share... All is well, apparently.

   (The emacs exe is 26 MB though -- 8 after strip; I wonder how much of it is actually statically linked... Well, not much! ldd lists 65 shared libs! :-o )

Windows 10

-> #4