Re: Bloat in the Emacs Windows package

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

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

>> Some people want the binary zip to include all the optional features that
>> Emacs on Windows can support.  This zip includes all of the dependencies for
>> those optional features.  Arguably, some of the auxiliary files, like header
>> files and import libraries, could be omitted, but determining which ones are
>> required is a very non-trivial and time-consuming job, so I can understand
>> why Phillip, who volunteered to produce the binary zips, didn't do that.
>> This "one cannot fit all" problem is why we also have the bare-minimum zip
>> with only the dependencies that are absolutely required.
>
> Indeed.  But I wonder about licensing issues of some of those binaries:
> for those packages which are (L)GPL'd, do we distribute the
> corresponding source somewhere, like the license requires us to do?

https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/emacs/windows/emacs-26/emacs-26-deps-mingw-w64-src.zip

Packaged at the same time as the binaries, which is about the best I can
do to keep the source the same as that which was used to produce the
source.


>
>>>     addpm.exe 577 kB => 2 282 kB
>>>     ctags.exe 956 kB => 3 245 kB
>>>     emacs.exe 8 989 kB => 121 740 kB
>>>     emacs-24.5.exe 8 989 kB => 121 740 kB (emacs-26.1.exe)
>> Stripping emacs.exe produces a 29MB file for Emacs 26.2.
>
> I wonder what caused the 9MB => 29MB jump between 24.5 and 26?

Probably the -static flag that I added. Otherwise, the 64bit file
required libpthread and (at the time) I had no ability to distribute
this because I didn't have a way of generating the source.


>> We don't provide any shell scripts or batch files because the build on Posix
>> systems doesn't.  Once again, it's hard to blame volunteers for using the
>> build products as is, without adding any more work.
>
> FWIW, I think saving a 100MB is worth the extra work.

It isn't extra work. I just change the compile options on my build
scripts. I genuinely have no idea why they are there in the first place;
perhaps I put them in because someone told me to, perhaps not.


> (but, indeed, using hard-links is the better option when available:
> I often just `rm src/emacs-[0-9]*` to get rid of old Emacs releases it'd
> be much trickier to do if src/emacs were a script that runs
> src/emacs-27.0.50.5).

It's also possible to turn on NTFS file compression which will remove
both this and lots of other duplications in the Emacs install. AFAIK,
this is a user option, however, although I might be able to do it with
the installer version for Emacs-27.

Phil