Re: Emacs 26.1 on Windows is HUGE

[Óscar Fuentes]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

>> From: Björn Lindqvist <bjourne@gmail.com>
>> Date: Wed, 17 Apr 2019 00:18:27 +0200
>> Cc: Óscar Fuentes <ofv@wanadoo.es>, help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org
>> 
>> As someone who don't use MSYS I don't understand the advantage of
>> duplicating the files?
>
> This has nothing to do with MSYS.  It's for when you install the next
> version, emacs.exe gets overwritten, but emacs-26.1.exe stays, and you
> can still invoke it.  IOW, it allows you to have several Emacs
> versions installed simultaneously.
>
> We didn't invent this for Windows, this is how Emacs installs itself
> on all supported systems.  We just follow that on Windows, to be
> consistent with all the other systems.

To be fair, on *nix (where the current build and install system was
developed) emacs is a symlink to emacs-XX-Y, so there is no disk space
wasted. On Windows that's not the case.

Having multiple installed versions makes sense for Emacs developers and
for users who build from sources and don't want to delete the old
version before testing the new one. But for most users, who install
packaged binaries, it is not all that important.

I see little real application for that duplication on Windows and hardly
anybody will care about not having emacs.XX.Y.exe along with emacs.exe.
For many years that was the case and nobody complained AFAIK.

I don't really care about this duplication on Emacs, though, as it is
a comparatively minor offender. The lack of usable symlinks on Windows
makes certain packages to use more than 1 GB of disk space (without
debug info) when on GNU/Linux use a fraction of that, just because the
developers of those packages work on *nix and take symlinks for granted.