Re: Bloat in the Emacs Windows package

[phillip.lord@russet.org.uk (Phillip Lord)]

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

> Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> writes:
>
>>> I am currently not treating snapshots and release builds differently at
>>> all.  When I took over the windows builds, there were no snapshots to my
>>> knowledge.  It's possible that is why I put debug symbols in and meant to
>>> take them out but didn't.
>>
>> Indeed, the snapshots should be distributed with full debug info
>> (even if some users don't appreciate it).
>
>
> So, currently we have:
>
> CFLAGS="-O2 -static -g3"
>
> In future, we should have for snapshots
>
> CFLAGS="-O2 -static -g3"
>
> and build with "make install", while for tagged releases (including
> release candidates) I will use:
>
> CFLAGS="-O2 -static"
>
> and build with "make install-strip" (I can't see the point in doing -g3
> and make install-strip).
>
> I'll also build some snapshots for release branches (as well as master)
> so that there will be a build with debug info to be distributed on
> alpha.gnu.org. This will be mostly be at a slightly different commit
> from the release; so, sometimes no use for debugging a new bug
> introduced into a recent release, although, I can always build a new
> snapshot.


I have now trialled there and there are versions on alpha

https://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/emacs/pretest/windows/emacs-27/

The "emacs-27.0.50" files are built like a release build, while the
"-snapshot" ones are built like a snapshot build.

In terms of the download size, -no-deps drops from 107M to 46M which is
the most extreme drop. The installer version drops by only 10M because
it's lzma compressed. Uncompressed sizes will be proportionately
larger.

Happy if people want to give these a trial to see if there is any
functional or otherwise noticable difference between the two. I update
the build scripts on master in a short while if there are no complaints.

Phil