Re: Bloat in the Emacs Windows package

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

Óscar Fuentes <ofv@wanadoo.es> writes:

> Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:
>
>>> Are all those dependencies necessary?
>>
>> The answer depends on what you intend to do with Emacs.
>
> Phillip goes to great lengths to be helpful, but IMO he is distributing
> too much stuff. There are plenty of dlls on the Emacs /bin directory
> with potential to break things. It would break my setup for sure,
> because it contains the tcl/tk dlls that will interfere with what I have
> installed.

I think that there are two plausible options here. The first is the one
that Chris from Emacs-W64 took. He put the DLLs for the direct
dependencies in (libjpg, libgif and so on) and some others. That's nice,
but it doesn't fulfil all parts of Emacs functionality -- for example,
M-x find-dired doesn't work, nor does flyspell because they lack find
and aspell.

The other option is to do what I have done; I have taken Emacs direct
dependencies and pulled in all the transistive dependencies according to
MSYS2, right or wrong. So M-x find-dired does work (as do images and as
does package.el). In the process you also get tcl/tk and, indeed,
python. Some things still do not work (so auctex can't compile because
of no latex).

I choose the later because I didn't want to hand-maintain a list of
dependencies for myself. This would be a significant task and one that
it would be hard to perform well, especially in the absence of a test
set for all of Emacs' functionality.

I am happy to consider a more minimal distribution of Emacs but I need
to know a way of producing this minimal dependency list. The code for
this is in admin/nt/dist-build. I welcome any amendments to this, but it
has to be automatic. In the mean time, you have the choice of a
dependency free version for when faced with issues like tcl/tk.

Phil