Re: Emacs 26.1 on Windows is HUGE

[Phillip Lord <phillip.lord@russet.org.uk>]

Óscar Fuentes <ofv@wanadoo.es> writes:

> Björn Lindqvist <bjourne@gmail.com> writes:
>
>> I thought it was time to update my version of Emacs on Windows. So I
>> download emacs-26.1-x86_64-no-deps.zip package from
>> http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/emacs/windows/emacs-26/. It is a whopping 109
>> mb and consumes 407 mb of space uncompressed. The emacs.exe file
>> itself is 121 mb. In comparison the emacs 24.5 installation consumes
>> 160 mb and emacs.exe itself 8 mb.
>>
>> I posit that there is something wrong with the way Emacs is packaged
>> for Windows. Perhaps there is a more lightweight distribution?
>
> Most likely the executables include debug information. It uses disk
> space but no RAM.

They do. In addition, between 24 and 25 there was a change of build system.

> On addition to that, one thing that makes little for this distribution
> is to include emacs.exe and emacs-26.1.exe, which are identical.
>
> BTW, 26.2 was just released, although the binary pretests on
>
> https://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/emacs/pretest/windows/emacs-26/
>
> have the same size.
>
> You can use `strip.exe' (from binutils) to remove the debug information.
>
> You can use M-x report-emacs-bug to suggest removing debug info prior to
> packaging and/or not including redundant executables as emacs-26.1.exe.

Removing the redundant executables would break things for people who
want to unpack over an MSYS installation. If you really care about the
disk space (100Mb is really stretching the definition of "huge" these
days), using file system level compression would solve this problem, as
well as reducing the size of other parts of Emacs also.

Happy for there to be a discussion about debug information of
emacs-devel, though. If it's not needed, it can be removed.

Phil