From: Phillip Lord <phillip.lord@russet.org.uk>
To: Mathias Dahl <mathias.dahl@gmail.com>
Cc: emacs-devel@gnu.org
Subject: Re: Could we include diff and grep (etc.) executables on Windows?
Date: Mon, 18 Nov 2019 15:48:48 +0000 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <87y2wd6v8f.fsf@russet.org.uk> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <CABrcCQ4i+FWH-WNLLNFcK=jiqgnfsFifE7ebC5wwGhvb9PgY7A@mail.gmail.com> (Mathias Dahl's message of "Sun, 17 Nov 2019 12:50:19 +0100")
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
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2019-11-18 15:48 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 16+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2019-11-17 11:50 Could we include diff and grep (etc.) executables on Windows? Mathias Dahl
2019-11-17 16:07 ` Eli Zaretskii
2019-11-17 16:53 ` Stefan Monnier
2019-11-17 17:09 ` Eli Zaretskii
2019-11-17 17:49 ` Óscar Fuentes
2019-11-17 19:39 ` Stefan Monnier
2019-11-18 15:53 ` Phillip Lord
2019-11-18 18:05 ` Stephen Leake
2019-11-19 14:56 ` Phillip Lord
2019-11-19 15:43 ` Eli Zaretskii
2019-11-19 20:32 ` Óscar Fuentes
2019-11-20 16:11 ` Eli Zaretskii
2019-11-18 15:49 ` Phillip Lord
2019-11-18 16:08 ` Eli Zaretskii
2019-11-18 15:48 ` Phillip Lord [this message]
2019-11-18 16:09 ` Eli Zaretskii
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