Re: Bloat in Windows (revisited)

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

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

>> From: Nikolay Kudryavtsev <nikolay.kudryavtsev@gmail.com>
>> Date: Mon, 10 Jun 2019 11:52:55 +0300
>> 
>> I was wondering about this bloat too. So the gist of my question is - do we have to bundle dependencies with
>> their optional stuff due to some reason, like licensing requirements?
>
> No, the only reason is that "Someone" has to figure out which parts
> are necessary for Emacs and which aren't.  Assuming, that is, that no
> one will use these binary distributions for any purpose other than
> running Emacs.


And, unfortunately, in the absence of a test set which tests the compile
time functionality of Emacs, it's hard to do this. I don't use Emacs on
Windows myself, so am left with asking users.

An example here is libwinpthreads which was or is required for operation
of libXpm, at least the DLLs from msys2 (which we do not use for the "no
dependencies" download of Emacs).

In answer to the question about licensing, identifying exactly what
source is required to fulfil GPL is also a little hard, so having too
big a dependency list here strikes me as a reasonably solution.

At this point, the debug snapshot release installer is 50Mb. The
non-debug stripped version should be smaller still. Both of these are
smaller than the source tarball for Emacs-24.5. At this point, the cost
benefit to a smaller distribution size still seems a little moot.

Phil