No README at someGNU mirrors

No README at someGNU mirrors

[Drew Adams]

At the GNU Emacs download page,
https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/download.html, there is
a link, http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/emacs/windows/, for downloading
GNU Emacs from the main site.  No problem with that.

There is another link, http://ftpmirror.gnu.org/emacs/windows,
which takes you to one of the mirror sites for downloading -
presumably a different mirror each time you follow the link.

Some of those mirror sites do not have the README file.
They have only the .zip's and .zip.sig's.

Without the README file you won't see this info, in particular:

  There are two binary distributions named
  emacs-n-x86_64-w64-mingw32.zip and
  emacs-n-i686-w64-mingw32.zip. These are for 64-bit and 32-bit
  machines respectively.

So you won't know which link to use.  The zip-file names
do not obviously tell you which is 64-bit and which is 32-bit.

Sure, many people will know what x86 vs i686 means.
And anyone can google "x86 vs i686", to find out, if
they don't know.  Still, some people will not know and
may not find out.

This is not as helpful for users as it should be.  Dunno
what the solution is.  Maybe a better naming scheme?
There are occurrences of "64" in both names, which can
add to the confusion.

Yes, it's clear enough if you have the README, and the
dates in the names etc. are clear enough.  But the 32-bit
vs 64-bit distinction is not very clear from just the zip
names.