Re: Emacs 29.0.50 Snapshot binaries for WIndows

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: chad <yandros@gmail.com>
> Date: Mon, 21 Feb 2022 13:41:16 -0500
> Cc: EMACS development team <emacs-devel@gnu.org>
> 
> This is a subtle but important point for anyone who is interested in 
> semi-frequent snapshots (as opposed to
> releases). Under Windows, macOS, and a small subset of other systems (like 
> Snap and Flatpak), these
> snapshots are typically contained to a single app-specific directory. Adding 
> one is another directory; moving
> or removing one is likewise a single directory operation. On the other hand, 
> the installed version of emacs on
> most GNU/Linux systems ends up with directories in several different 
> directories, often in similar but not
> identical places from one distro to the next. This means that whatever tools 
> are used to manage the
> snapshots need to track where things were added and, when multiple versions 
> are installed simultaneously,
> which are to be removed (or shared, or overwritten). This sort of operation 
> gets very quickly into the specifics
> of a distro, and thus is better handled within the mechanisms of that distro. 
> Thankfully, this is already being
> done (and not just recently), for all of the major distros as far as I know, 
> as well as for systems like Snap and
> (different but perhaps related) Docker.

There's no difference between Windows and Posix systems wrt to the
directories where Emacs components are installed.  the only difference
is that on Windows the top-level directory of the installation tree is
not a standard one, but one chosen by the user.  But under that
top-level directory, the tree is the same.  And if one installs
snapshots on a system with working environment, one is unlikely to
install each snapshot in its own top-level directory, because that
will require much more tinkering: change Path, amend INFOPATH, etc.

Bottom line: there shouldn't be a significant difference here between
installation on Posix systems and installation on Windows.  (macOS is
an entirely different ball game.)

And I don't think this aspect is very relevant to the issue at hand.