Re: Bloat in the Emacs Windows package

[Phillip Lord]

Óscar Fuentes <address@hidden> writes:

> Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> writes:
>
>> Of course.  But those situations need special-purpose packages, and
>> each one of those will need a volunteer dedicated to produce and
>> support it.  The popular demand clearly shifted to having the
>> comprehensive packages with everything included.
>>
>> Feel free to volunteer to produce a bare-minimum Emacs package for
>> such situation.
>
> We have the no-deps package, but with dozens of MB of debug info and a
> duplicated large binary. I doubt this benefits 0.1% of the Emacs user
> base. And that benefit is just a minor convenience for them.

I made the no-deps package to address your use case -- when you have the
dependencies already. Size was not my primary concern.


> OTOH, the bigger the file to download, the less people will get it.
> People that will use something else. For a political (or social, if you
> prefer) project as GNU/Emacs, this is not acceptable when you can
> significantly reduce the download with a few trivial changes (1).
>
> I live on Western Europe and know plenty of people who access the
> Internet through metered and/or slow connections.
>
> And then we have the issue with general bloat in IT and the associated
> waste. I feel morally obligued to not contribute to that waste.

I agree that this is morally correct; but then so is producing free
software which is competitive with non-free software. I do not believe
that an Emacs incapable of loading jpgs or using its own package manager
securely fulfils that objective.

> 1. Using a better compression method, such as 7z, probably will reduce
> the download significantly.

Yes, and this is why the Emacs-27.exe installer uses lzma. It is,
indeed, smaller with deps than the zip version without. But, I missed
the emacs-26 branch.

Phil