Re: Bloat in Windows (revisited)

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

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

>> 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.
>
> Yes, I agree with the general desire.  I just proposed a hypothetical
> way to make the slope less slippery by reducing the difference between
> the tools that are bundled and those that aren't.
>
>> 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.
>
> [ Not sure what is the relation between executable-find and this
>   discussion.  I was thinking about catching the error you get from
>   start/call-process and then looking up some ad-hoc list of
>   known commands and their corresponding MSYS2 package.  ]

Oh, "executable-find" is just a cheap and cheerful way of giving some
idea of what executables Emacs might well look for.


>> 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.
>
> I'm too far from Windows to know anything about that.
> So maybe indeed there's no good solution here.
>
> I was hoping we could write some Elisp that can download&install
> a minimal MSYS2, and another that can ask MSYS2 to install some tool.


I think this would be effectively rewriting pacman in elisp which seems
like a bad idea. Pre-bundling seems the only sensible solution. People
who want to install new dependencies already know how to do this, I
think -- which is install the no-deps Emacs over an existing MSYS.

>> On the other question, does excluding mingw-w64-x86_64-glib2 and subtree
>> seem sensible?
>
> I'm too far from Windows to know anything about that ;-)

Me too, alas.