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

[Phillip Lord <phillip.lord@russet.org.uk>]

Stephen Leake <stephen_leake@stephe-leake.org> writes:

> Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> writes:
>
>> God question.  IIUC one of the main problems with bundling tools is
>> having to compile them, keep the versions up-to-date, distributing the
>> sources, etc....
>>
>> So what I meant mostly was: don't actually bundle them, but just provide
>> some straightforward way to install Emacs+tools where the tools are
>> actually fetched from some other place that handles the job of
>> compiling, keeping them up-to-date, distributing the sources, ...
>>
>> I assumed MSYS could be that "other place" but apparently that's not
>> the case.  Maybe that doesn't invalidate the underlying idea, tho.
>
> There is an emacs package currently in MSYS2, with both mingw-w64 and
> msys2 versions (for emacs 26.2). I have not tried them (mainly because
> they didn't used to be there), so I don't know what other packages/tools
> they install.
>
> There are also emacs packages in Cygwin, for text and X11 (for emacs
> 26.3); I have not tried those in a long time.
>
> So "die-hard" mingw or cygwin users are already covered. That leaves the
> Gnu distribution of Emacs for Windows to cover the remaining users,
> which are probably a very diverse lot.
>
> I compile emacs from source (usually master, sometimes the release
> branch), and use MSYS2/mingw64 for all tools not provided by emacs (as
> do many others). For tools not yet in MSYS2 (primarily LaTeX), I use
> Cygwin. This process does have some downsides, but I find it the best
> way.


Be good to know what you mean by "all the tools". That would form the
basis of a list that we might install.

I have created a branch called feature/windows-with-utils. I am happy
for people to add new packages like so:

diff --git a/admin/nt/dist-build/build-dep-zips.py b/admin/nt/dist-build/build-dep-zips.py
index 5698f51..5df7694 100755
--- a/admin/nt/dist-build/build-dep-zips.py
+++ b/admin/nt/dist-build/build-dep-zips.py
@@ -40,6 +40,11 @@ mingw-w64-x86_64-libxml2
 mingw-w64-x86_64-xpm-nox'''.split()
 
 
+## This list is some extra things that we want to add because they are useful
+PKG_REQ=PKG_REQ+'''
+mingw-w64-x86_64-diffutils'''.split()
+
+

That would give me an idea of how much bigger the download would get. If
it's just a bit, then good. If it's a lot, I think, we need two yet more
optional downloads which would be a little unfortunate.

Phil