Re: Finding the dump

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Stefan Monnier <address@hidden>
> Cc: Andreas Schwab <address@hidden>,  address@hidden
> Date: Sun, 27 Jan 2019 13:52:03 -0500
> 
> > Indeed.  In fact, Stefan's suggestion is just a slightly fancy (and
> > less portable) way of having an executable script which does
> >   /foo/bar/emacs --dump-file=/wherever/something.pdmp
> > This is something users with certain needs and workflows may wish
> > doing, but I see no reason why we as a project would need to force
> > everyone on using such a setup.
> 
> If the format of the dump file were changed to allow the first page to
> be skipped, it'd be for end-users to make it work without needing an
> extra file.

The Emacs installation comes with some 3000 files; why should we care
about one more or less?  The energy we will have spent on finding a
way to do what you want, and do that in a way that won't get us back
into the same kind of trouble as unexec, is better invested in other
areas.

> > I see no advantages in it that would justify it.
> 
> The only reason I can see not to want to support such a use case is the
> need to keep using the current setup (presumably because it's
> hard/inconvenient to support the other setup everywhere, i.e. because
> shebangs don't work in Windows and because they don't work quite right
> in MacOS (IIUC they'd break string using "#!emacs --script")).
> 
> Other than that, making the dump be the file that is put in $PATH is the
> better option.

It's just not economical, IMO.  The disadvantages you enumerate are
already enough to not like this.