Re: [feature/internal-msys] thoughts of a more function windows package

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Phillip Lord <phillip.lord@russet.org.uk>
> Cc: emacs-devel@gnu.org
> Date: Thu, 21 Jan 2021 21:37:57 +0000
> 
> Yep, it's big. I get this before installation:
> 
> 319 MB (335,214,637 bytes)
> 
> and this after installation.
> 
> 826 MB (866,624,644 bytes)
> 
> My guess is that it's the co-install of perl that is causing this issue
> rather than vim.

It's Vim, and Perl, and Tcl.  And at some point I'd expect them to
include Python as well, to support those Git commands which rely on
it.

> But, openssh comes for free with this. And "huge" is a
> relative term. An installation under 1Gb seems reasonable to me.

I thought this started as an attempt to make the Emacs installation
smaller...

If the rationale is to provide a full development environment on top
of MS-Windows, then indeed the size will be much larger, and you will
need to include a lot of packages there.  Just be sure to spell this
out (including the size, perhaps) when you ask the user whether he or
she wants to install that.

> > Next, by "msys" you mean all those non-native programs that depend on
> > msys-1.0.dll?  That's again meant for MinGW developers, not "normal"
> > users.
> 
> Yes. Because it's got all the packages and tools and as far as I can
> see, they work with Emacs.

They mostly work, until they don't.  Like with Cygwin, there are
subtle incompatibilities, mainly in file names and in communications
with subprocesses and response to "signals".  Encoding defaults are
also different.

> > (Btw, pacman can ask questions and prompt the user for confirmation,
> > but the way you invoke it in w32-msys-run doesn't seem to be prepared
> > for such interaction?)
> 
> That's why I use "--no-confirm". I'm looking for the minimum here that
> does something usable.

What happens when pacman wants to replace Bash from which it was
launched, or update itself or some of its component DLLs?

> > I think the only good idea here is to tell the user to amend PATH by
> > adding such-and-such directories to it.  I don't like installers that
> > futz with my PATH, and would hate it if Emacs did that to others.
> > It's very easy to get that wrong, especially on Windows.
> 
> There has to be a better way that this.

The only way I know of is to distribute a program that writes into the
Registry.  Don't forget that there are system-wide variables and
variables specific to the current user.  And some systems have the
former locked down and the latter requires a UAC elevation.  Good luck
(you will need it) with successfully negotiating all these obstacles.