Re: Could we include diff and grep (etc.) executables on Windows?

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

Mathias Dahl <mathias.dahl@gmail.com> writes:
> I sometimes help friends at work trying out Emacs. We're mostly on Windows
> and one thing that makes things harder is that some of the useful features
> of Emacs uses external tools. I'm thinking specifically about small
> utilities like diff, grep, etc. So, on Windows, useful features like Ediff
> and the different grep-based tools do not work out of the box.
>
> I see that we bundle some exe files in the bin directory of Emacs (bunzip2,
> bzcat, etc.), could we include some of the other core utilities as well?
>
> Of course, if you commit to use Emacs you can make sure to install these
> tools in one of several ways it can be done today (Cygwin. MSYS, natively
> compiled, etc.) but users could be up and running much faster if they did
> not have to do this. If you are trying out Emacs and compare it with other
> editors today, where some of this are also built in but work without these
> external tools, you might give up.
>
> Any comments and opinions on this? Does anything stop us from bundling a
> few more useful utilities to make Emacs even more useful by default? I
> think it should benefit many users.
>
> Thanks!
>
> /Mathias
>
> PS. Of course, Emacs has support for many external tools, and one might
> ask: where do we stop? But, I think the core features, mentioned above, are
> good candidates to include by default.

I think, a priori, there would be no particular problem with doing this,
in terms of the packaging and bundling. But there would be a problem in
terms of curating the list of things we added. In addition, there is the
difficulty that the size of the Emacs download will go up; so, in fact,
between Emacs-26 and -27 the number of external packages has dropped
(so, for example, python was in Emacs-26, but is not in Emacs-27). I
made this change because of complaints about size.

Still, the build scripts that I have written could be modified to
support adding additional binaries relatively easily. So, it would be
straight-forward to add diff and grep and see what difference it makes.
Other things on my list would be gunzip and aspell.

But I'd really need a good set of critera for making a decision. I did
think about just greping source for "executable-find", but that fails as
soon as you hit interpreters (python, perl and latex for example). I
could say "called by emacs and relatively small for some value of
small".

Phil