Re: Compressing the Lisp and Info files in the MS-Windows installation

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: "Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@xemacs.org>
> Cc: emacs-devel@gnu.org
> Date: Tue, 16 Apr 2013 17:18:18 +0900
> 
> Wouldn't the sensible thing to do on Windows be to use zip

Maybe so, but it isn't trivial: Emacs doesn't support transparent
decompression of zip-compressed files as it does with gzip (and other
formats that compress single files).  So it's a separate project, and
not a trivial one, i.e. not limited to the configury stuff, which is
what I'm working on now.

> [zip] which in some form seems to always be available [on Windows]?

That's actually false, or at least not true in the sense you seem to
assume or imply.

What _is_ true is that Windows nowadays supports zip archives out of
the box in its File Manager (a.k.a. "Explorer").  But that support
comes from inside the application; there isn't any zip.exe or
unzip.exe when you install Windows, unless you install some optional
3rd-party package.

From my experience, that 3rd party packages tend to be GUI
applications, which Emacs cannot use anyway.  Not sure how this
compares with what others see.  (I personally use InfoZip's zip all
the time, but that's me; I see others like 7z etc.)

> While it doesn't directly address Drew's gripe that it's a PITA for
> the user who wants to grep, it does make it easier to undo the
> operation since there's only one zipfile for the elisp and one for
> the info.

Having the Info files in a single zip archive will need also support
from Texinfo's stand-alone Info reader, before it can be considered as
acceptable.  By contrast, gzip-compressed Info files are already
supported by Texinfo.

> Many programs will now treat a zipfile as a filesystem mounted at the
> zipfile's path, as well.

That's true, and so does Emacs.  But to grep this, we need _grep_ to
support that, which it doesn't.

> Dunno if grep or Emacs can do that

It cannot.

> on Windows, [...] Explorer has treated a zipfile as a directory
> rather than an archive since Windows XP I think

True.