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

[Phillip Lord]

Nikolay Kudryavtsev <nikolay.kudryavtsev@gmail.com> writes:

> Sorry for late reply, but I think that while bundling msys2 is a good
> idea in theory, in practice it would turn into a complete
> nightmare. The problem, just like with bundling any third party
> components is that you have to maintain them. If you bundle the latest
> and shiniest msys2, you can never be sure if it's really properly
> working for our use cases. And if you bundle some pretested version,
> you run into "hey, please fix bug A, the upstream has already fixed
> it", but we can't switch to upstream due to bug B.
>
> Msys2 sort of missed the boat in that they took pacman, but didn't
> bother with making their own AUR.


The work on this has stalled at the moment anyway, but my plan would be
to work out how to link an Emacs installation to an Msys2 installation,
by setting up paths correctly, as well as defining a set of packages
that are useful for Emacs.

There is always the risk that msys and Emacs work inconsistently since,
with this scenario, msys could update at any point that breaks things. I
don't think that there is any solution to this than to say that the last
release version of Emacs will work with a version of msys which is about
current at the time of release. What else can we do? In the case, that
basic Emacs functionality fails, people could always fall back to the
fully bundled Emacs with DLLs that is currently available.

The current situation where Emacs without msys2 lacks basic capabilities
such as git handling which many other editors have bundled is also
problematic!

Phil