[h-e-w] Emacs Installers. Was: Control frame size on startup from .emacs

[David Vanderschel]

On Thursday, May 05, "Neil J Mackie" <address@hidden> wrote:
>The use of installers and registry keys by emacs will prevent me using it,
>as there is no way I am allowed to modify the registry or run an installer.
>The corporate environment just does not allow it. The OS image is created
>once and stamped on hundreds of PCs across the organisation from a 3rd party
>support organisation 100s or 100s of miles away. The first step taken by
>support, should you call them, is most likely to reformat your C drive and
>restamp it with the current image.

It seems to me that, with such a draconian approach to
security, the powers that be would not be sympathetic
to _any_ installation of emacs whether it touched the
registry or not and whether it involved running an
installer or not.  Neil, it appears that you are
saying that you could sneak it past them if you could
install it by simply unpacking the tar archive and if
you do not then have to touch the registry.
Furthermore, it sounds like you want to influence
emacs developers to facilitate such a deception.

It does not strike me that environments as constrained
as Neil says his is are an important target for emacs
functionality.  I think of emacs as primarily a
developer's tool; and I don't think a developer can
readily live with the sorts of restrictions Neil
describes.

Use of the registry by emacs remains minimal.  My
impression is that such uses were convenient
alternatives to more cumbersome approaches (which also
work).  AFAIK, you can get emacs to work under Windows
without modifying the registry; but I do think some
environment variables need to be set.  (Someone please
correct me if I am wrong on this.)  My initialization
sets the following relevant environment variables:
HOME, EMACS_UNIBYTE, and MANPATH.  Thanks to the
registry, I do not even have ...emacs/bin/ in my load
path.

Note that emacs is already installed and runs fine
under Knoppix!  ;-)

Now if only someone could make a "live CD" for emacs
that would run under Windows.  That's probably what
Neil needs.

Regards,
  David V.