Compressing the Lisp and Info files in the MS-Windows installation

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

If the 'gzip' program is available, the Posix installation procedure
("make install") by default compresses all the *.el files in the lisp/
directory and its subdirectories of the installation tree, and also
compresses all the *info files in the info/ directory there.  Are
there any reasons not to do the same when Emacs is installed on
MS-Windows?

A related issue is whether the precompiled Windows binaries should be
distributed with these files compressed.  If they are compressed, end
users will need to have 'gzip' installed to be able to use them.

A compressed tree is 47 MB leaner than an uncompressed one (143 MB vs
190 MB).

I assume that people who prepare the binary distributions for Windows
will run something like "make install prefix=x:/foo/bar", and then
produce a zip file from the tree created at x:/foo/bar.  Thus the
above question is related both to local installations and preparing a
binary distribution for uploading to the FTP site.

(Even if the default is to compress, one can install without
compressing by saying "make install GZIP_PROG=".  So the question
really is what should be the default.)

Comments and opinions are welcome.