Re: Bloat in Windows (revisited)

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

Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> writes:

>> Beware: you are on a slippery slope.  What about Diff, what about
>> 'man', what about bzip2 and lzip and xz?  And if you provide a speller
>> (I suggest Hunspell, btw, not aspell), then what about dictionaries?
>> Etc. etc.
>
> Agreed.  What might make sense is to catch the error signaled when an
> executable is not found and turn it into a clear message pointing the
> user to simple instructions for how to install those tools via MSYS2
> (or whichever other way).


Absolutely, this is a slippery slope, but then to break the metaphor,
you need to the view from the top of a slope is always better.

I think many editors would have "integrated" find tools even if this is
just a call out to the OS GUI tool for doing the same. Likewise, spell
checker. A quick "grep" for executable-find gives 300 hits. Many are
languages (i.e. in progmodes), many are text processing commands or
viewers. After that, we do not have that large a list.

I don't think that there are simple instructions on how to install these
tools, other than "re-install this version of Emacs over msys2 (or just
install Emacs via msys2) then add the packages with pacman". This is why
I am asking the question.

On the other question, does excluding mingw-w64-x86_64-glib2 and subtree
seem sensible? If so, I will add this master.

Phil