Re: "Official" binary of Emacs-24.4 for MS-Windows

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> Date: Sat, 25 Oct 2014 10:00:23 +0200
> From: Dani Moncayo <dmoncayo@gmail.com>
> Cc: Emacs development discussions <emacs-devel@gnu.org>
> 
> > I don't object to not compressing the files, if compressing them
> > causes trouble on some systems.
> 
> This system is Windows 8.1 64-bit, and, according to what you said:
> 
> >> I don't see a reason not to compress files.  Emacs can display and use
> >> them just fine, even if gzip.exe is not installed/available, right?
> 
> not being able to show the manual (nor visiting .gz files -- I've just
> tried) seemed like a bug.  It this expected (when gzip.exe is not
> available) or should I report this as a bug?

It's probably a missing feature, since we have zlib-decompress-region
now.  I misremembered: we still need gzip to display compressed files.

> Regarding the format of the binary archive, there are several options:
> 
>   Format  Archive Size
>   zip     50 MB
>   tar.gz  50 MB
>   tar.xz  32 MB
>   7z      31 MB
> 
> As you see, the last two formats produce an archive considerably
> smaller.  Which format should I choose?

IMO, you should use zip, because unpacking it does not require any
external tools to be installed on Windows.  The large size of the
archive is unfortunate, but asking users to install additional
programs is IMO worse.

> Regarding the name of the binary archive, the convention so far has
> been "emacs-VERSION-bin-i386".  But if I eval `system-configuration'
> from that Emacs I get `i686-pc-mingw32'.  So, perhaps we should name
> the archive as "emacs-24.4-bin-i686", or (even better IMO),
> "emacs-24.4-bin(i686-pc-mingw32)".  I like the latter format, because
> it is a general and compact way of telling not only the hardware
> architecture, but also OS flavor it was built for.  It is quite
> self-explanatory.
> 
> But of course the choice is yours. Which filename should I choose?

I prefer emacs-24.4-i686-pc-mingw32-bin.zip.  I don't like parentheses
in the file names, because they are special to some shells.

> And finally, note that I haven't got an answer yet to the request I
> sent 2 days ago (to ftp-upload@gnu.org) for ftp upload rights.  So I
> still can't upload anything.  (I could send the archive to anyone with
> proper upload right...)

I hope Glenn will be able to help here, I have no experience with
uploading to GNU FTP sites.