Re: Emacs 26.1 on Windows is HUGE

[Phillip Lord]

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.


Yes, if you install them in the same location. But if you do the
suggested thing of unpacking them with "extract" from the file explorer
menu, each will get their own directory, so you will have
emacs-26.1/bin/emacs.exe and emacs-26.2/bin/emacs.exe.

How many people unpack one Emacs version over another? There isn't any
real advantage to doing so, unless you want to share files between the
two versions.

Phil