Re: Could we include diff and grep (etc.) executables on Windows?

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: Óscar Fuentes <ofv@wanadoo.es>
> Date: Tue, 19 Nov 2019 21:32:40 +0100
> 
> Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:
> 
> >> For the case of diff and grep MSYS2 has native binaries
> >
> > But that's about all, so it seems.  There are no Coreutils, no
> > Findutils, no Grep, no Sed, etc.
> 
> MSYS2 already has native Sed, Grep

It does?  Maybe I'm blind, but "pacman -Ss" disagrees, it only shows
msys packages for these.

> Findutils would be doable.

Doable, yes.  But not easy, if you want 'find', 'locate', and 'xargs'
to work: they use fork/exec/waitpid, take inode equality to mean
identical files/directories, expect you to be able to pass quoted
wildcards, etc.  That's why years ago I had to do my own port, because
the existing ones were either broken, or abysmally slow (or both).

> Nowadays I just install some new fancy searcher (such as ag, the Silver
> Searcher) and that covers the explicit Findutils+Grep case. IIRC there
> are places on Emacs that use Findutils+Grep under the hood (Dired?
> Ediff?).

grep-find and find-dired come to mind, and I think Cedet.  But we also
call xargs here and there.

> AFAIR never missed Sed or Coreutils on Emacs on Windows.

You don't use Dired?