Re: Bloat in the Emacs Windows package

[Stefan Monnier]

> Some people want the binary zip to include all the optional features that
> Emacs on Windows can support.  This zip includes all of the dependencies for
> those optional features.  Arguably, some of the auxiliary files, like header
> files and import libraries, could be omitted, but determining which ones are
> required is a very non-trivial and time-consuming job, so I can understand
> why Phillip, who volunteered to produce the binary zips, didn't do that.
> This "one cannot fit all" problem is why we also have the bare-minimum zip
> with only the dependencies that are absolutely required.

Indeed.  But I wonder about licensing issues of some of those binaries:
for those packages which are (L)GPL'd, do we distribute the
corresponding source somewhere, like the license requires us to do?

>>     addpm.exe 577 kB => 2 282 kB
>>     ctags.exe 956 kB => 3 245 kB
>>     emacs.exe 8 989 kB => 121 740 kB
>>     emacs-24.5.exe 8 989 kB => 121 740 kB (emacs-26.1.exe)
> Stripping emacs.exe produces a 29MB file for Emacs 26.2.

I wonder what caused the 9MB => 29MB jump between 24.5 and 26?

> We don't provide any shell scripts or batch files because the build on Posix
> systems doesn't.  Once again, it's hard to blame volunteers for using the
> build products as is, without adding any more work.

FWIW, I think saving a 100MB is worth the extra work.

(but, indeed, using hard-links is the better option when available:
I often just `rm src/emacs-[0-9]*` to get rid of old Emacs releases it'd
be much trickier to do if src/emacs were a script that runs
src/emacs-27.0.50.5).


        Stefan