Re: Could we include diff and grep (etc.) executables on Windows?

[Óscar Fuentes]

Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> writes:

>> Maybe streamlining the MSYS way to install Emacs is the easiest/best way
>> to solve this problem?
>
> Depends on what you mean by that (and what you mean when you say
> "MSYS").  In general, quite a few useful programs don't have native
> Windows ports in MSYS2 repository, so you will get MSYS ports instead,
> and that will cause subtle problems, similar to what happens when one
> mixes Cygwin programs with a native w32 Emacs.

For the case of diff and grep MSYS2 has native binaries, but I agree
with you in general, although it is perfectly ok to run Emacs without
the MSYS2 binaries in sight.

The real problem is that the MSYS2 approach would add some order of
magnitude to the complexity of packaging and publishing Emacs, so there
is no gain over "simply" adding the bare binaries to the current
packages, quite the contrary.