Re: Windows snapshot builds

[Rasmus <rasmus@gmx.us>]

phillip.lord@russet.org.uk (Phillip Lord) writes:

> Rasmus <rasmus@gmx.us> writes:
>
>> Hi Phillip,
>>
>> phillip.lord@russet.org.uk (Phillip Lord) writes:
>>
>>> Inspired by the upcoming release of Emacs-26 RC1, I've released some
>>> snapshots windows builds for Emacs-27.
>>>
>>> https://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/emacs/pretest/windows/emacs-27/
>>
>> Are you making the wonderful "*-deps-*.zip" packages?  If so thank you!
>
> I am, although they are no the default -- "no-deps.zip" contain the ones
> without.

Yes, that was the version I used last time I had to work on Windows PC.

>> I recently convinced the nice IT admin to install Emacs on my Windows work
>> PC on which I have zero fun rights.  So far, it has been working great in
>> that it makes it somewhat bearable to use a Windows PC.
>>
>> If possible, I might humbly request three other dependencies be included
>> in the future.
>>
>>   - zip.exe and unzip.exe (Info-Zip, I guess) are used when exporting ODT
>>     documents with Org and would be nice to include.
>>
>>   - spellcheckers like hunspell and maybe aspell would be really, really
>>     nice to have!  It’s admittedly a very soft dependency, but at least when
>>     you rely on Windows IT Admins, they get a bit confused when you first
>>     send them to the hunspell github page, only to tell them that the binary
>>     version can be gotten from Eli’s Sourceforge page...
>
>
> Hmmm. It's a good question. I mean, it's trivial to do, but there are
> two ways of looking at it.
>
> Currently, these files contain the build dependencies and all their
> dependencies. This, admittedly, turns out to be a pretty large
> collection of things, but still it falls short of a full msys
> install. So, one argument says we should keep to this.
>
> The other argument says, we should add stuff which is directly used by
> Emacs, and accept the fact, that we might end up with the best part of
> msys.
>
> Or we sit in the middle and install on a case-by-case basis.
>
> I'd be inclined to do with the latter one, with the knowledge that it
> might end up being two unwieldly.
>
> Thoughts from anyone else?

If I could, I would use MSYS2 to manage programs on my work-issued Windows
PC.  I am not sure the admins have experience with GNU/Linux systems in
particular and UNIX in general, and as such are reluctant to install
MSYS2.

On the other hand, they do know that you need your favorite "IDE" if your
work involves "programming", and as such it was no issue to have Emacs
installed.  The "deps" version is great because it is directly hosted by
GNU and contains mostly everything an Emacs user would need.  It would
just be great to have a few more "batteries" included.

Rasmus

-- 
Not everything that goes around comes back around, you know