bug#26024: Help with download...

[Drew Adams]

I think this might also be relevant:

http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2017-03/msg00084.html

 

At least if a README is present someone might think to look at it. If none is present then it's a guessing game. And even with the README, as the message above indicates, the zip-file naming convention is not obvious.

 

From: Christopher Smith [mailto:cmsmith193@gmail.com]

Yeah Mr. Morris, you're onto something there. I'm a sophomore physics student just looking around the web for useful tools and Quora.com lead me to emacs. I honestly have no idea what it is though and my programming skills end at hello world. Us windows users are definitely used to just going url ="" downloads => windows => for latest version click here! Thank you all so much though for the quick responses!

 

On Thu, Mar 9, 2017 at 12:09 AM, Glenn Morris <rgm@gnu.org> wrote:

FWIW I think the point here is that "here's the ftp server, you figure
out which file you need" is now archaic. The new thing is A Big
Button that you press that defaults to the "right" file for you, and a
small "other versions" link. See eg firefox.com.

Also, one normally skips to the end to get the latest version, but on
ftp.gnu.org/gnu/emacs/windows, "emacs-25.1-2" sorts before "emacs-25.1",
which doesn't help.

Perhaps MS Windows users are additionally confused to not get an .exe
file that they Just Click to start installing. There's a 200 line README
file that explains what to do, but no-one reads the README. :)