Re: Process to build standalone Emacs + deps in Windows

[Juan José García-Ripoll]

Phillip Lord <address@hidden> writes:
> Yes, all of this is true. I *mostly* just let MSYS2 decide what goes in,
> since it provides the full dependency list. There are a few exceptions
> which decrease the install size significantly (such as python). Combined
> with executable installer option, the overall download size is now at
> 50Mb -- this is incidentally, only a tad more than the no-deps zip.

You are right. Indeed, I did not realize that you had already shrunk the
size so much!

- I checked the 26.3 release and that one was 758Mb with emacs and
  dependencies.

- I just built dependencies with the method in the emacs-27 prerelease and
  x86_64 is just 128 Mb. Python is no longer installed and it is not listed as
  dependency by glib2.

Nevertheless, we could make further improvements:

- We can save further 37Mb by removing the linking libraries *.a from
  mingw64/lib

- Another 26Mb can be removed by eliminating the mingw64/share/doc and
  mingw64/share/gtk-doc folders. I would only leave share/doc/licenses for
  obvious reasons

- Since we are not shipping libraries, mingw64/include should also probably go.

- Since we are pulling in compression utilities, we may just as well tell the
  configuration to compress the *.el files. Windows is the only platform where
  this does not happen
  
- I would remove all utilities (*.exe) that are not strictly needed. I suspect
  the *tls*.exe tools are required. We could leave the those, the compressor
  and remove the rest.

With all this, except the removal of *.exe files, we go down to 52Mb (60%
reduction) uncompressed data, as reported by unzip. I know that space is not
much of an issue in this world, but I think it is fair to keep just what is
needed, plus it makes Emacs even smaller than most Electron apps around. First
impressions matter.

Cheers,

-- 
Juan José García Ripoll
http://juanjose.garciaripoll.com
http://quinfog.hbar.es