Re: [feature/dll-only-windows] A new windows build, comments wanted

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

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

>> From: Phillip Lord <phillip.lord@russet.org.uk>
>> Cc: emacs-devel@gnu.org
>> Date: Mon, 11 Jan 2021 09:59:29 +0000
>> 
>> > It's your call.  I just envision many users to expect native-comp
>> > support and asking why isn't it there.
>> 
>> No, you misunderstand me. I would plan to make Emacs-28
>> --with-nativecomp. But if I am doing this for the windows build, it is
>> reasonable to assume that other packagers will be doing for their
>> builds.
>
> Not necessarily: on platforms other than MS-Windows, if Emacs was
> linked against some optional library, that library must be installed
> for Emacs to run without crashing.
>
> So on MS-Windows you could build Emacs with all the possible
> extensions, and let users decide which ones they want to install and
> use.

The installer version could support that kind of thing, but I don't want
to provide too many options for the sake of confusion. The sort of
people who do not want features can probably build Emacs for themselves.


>
>> > The gzip thing is again your call (having gzip in the package is no
>> > big deal, IMO).  Dbus is not really useful on MS-Windows, so IMO it
>> > makes no sense building with it.
>> 
>> We've been down this road before.
>
> Did we reach any conclusions?

Yes, we concluded that it was hard to know where to stop!


>
>> I could add gzip and I am happy to consider this. But what other
>> tools do we add. What about aspell (or equivalent), so we can spell
>> check? Git so we can version? If I add them, then we get more
>> "out-of-the-box" behaviour. But where do we stop.
>
> We stop where you decide to stop.  (And the utility of aspell is much
> smaller than that of gzip, btw.  And the complexity of aspell
> installation is OTOH significantly greater.)  There's no need for any
> consistency here.  "Consistency is the hobgoblin", and all that.

I think that this is wrong. Gzip is minimal use on Windows, except for
info files, and the total install file size is 18Mb vs 5Mb.

Compare to aspell (or hunspell) for the people installing Emacs to use
Org mode? Or git for those who want to use magit. I think it would be
even better (i.e. potentially quicker!) if we could access these as
libraries.

Still, if the number of total downloads has decreased, adding a set of
command line utilities as extra options in the installer might be worth
considering. I will cogitate.

Phil