Re: file uncompression with native Windows Emacs

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: Will Parsons <varro@nodomain.invalid>
> Date: Thu, 8 Dec 2016 20:29:03 -0500
> 
> I'm confused about what I should expect for file uncompression with
> native Windows Emacs.  I'm running:
> 
> GNU Emacs 25.1.1 (i686-w64-mingw32)
> 
> Curiously, if I visit a file compressed with bzip2, Emacs has no
> problem opening it, but if I visit a file compressed with gzip, Emacs
> complains that "Uncompression program 'gzip' not found".
> 
> How is this supposed to work?  I don't see any compression binaries
> packages in the Emacs installation directory, but I do have an
> ezwinports directory that contains bzip2 utilities, so perhaps Emacs
> is using that (but how does it know?)

Yes, Emacs probably uses that binary.  You should see a message to
that effect in *Messages*.  How does it know? it looks along your PATH
to find the executable it needs.

> If ezwinports is the source of bzip2 for Emacs, I don't see similar
> gzip utilities, so I'm quite confused.

You should be able to find a Windows port of gzip on the GnuWin32
site:

  http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/gzip.htm

AFAIK, that's what I'm using; never bothered to port a newer version
because that one does a good-enough job for my needs.  (But of someone
points out why newer versions are so much better, I might be tempted
to provide their binaries.)

I'm quite sure there's a 64-bit port of gzip available from the MSYS2
site, but you'll have to find it yourself, or maybe someone else here
could post a URL.