From xemacs-m  Thu Dec 12 17:36:39 1996
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Date: Thu, 12 Dec 1996 15:36:04 -0800
Message-Id: <199612122336.PAA28703@xemacs.eng.sun.com>
From: Martin Buchholz <mrb@Eng.Sun.COM>
To: Steven L Baur <steve@miranova.com>
Cc: xemacs-beta@xemacs.org
Subject: Re: Distribution idea
In-Reply-To: <m2k9qntqjd.fsf@altair.xemacs.org>
References: <199612111850.NAA03282@nvwls.cc.purdue.edu>
	<199612122042.MAA28489@xemacs.eng.sun.com>
	<m2k9qntqjd.fsf@altair.xemacs.org>
Reply-To: Martin Buchholz <mrb@Eng.Sun.COM>
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>>>>> "Steven" == Steven L Baur <steve@miranova.com> writes:

>>>>> "Martin" == Martin Buchholz <mrb@eng.sun.com> writes:

Martin> But in order to avoid creating a dependency on having gzip on the
Martin> PATH, we need to do the gunzipping within code that is linked in to
Martin> XEmacs.  This means that zlib would have to become a standard part of
Martin> XEmacs. This would make XEmacs a little bigger (my libz.a is 67k).
Martin> Who wants to implement it?

Steven> No.  You have to have gzip/gunzip to do anything meaningful with the
Steven> distribution tarfile (tar zxf still requires a gzip binary), so I
Steven> don't think a Makefile dependency on them is too much of a hardship.

I disagree.  There are 3 toolsets XEmacs deals with: for maintainers,
for builders, and for end users.  It is reasonable to expect builders
to have gzip, but not for the end users to have it as well.  Most
commercial Unices don't come bundled with gzip (yes, I wish it were
different).  There exist CD's with xemacs, but not gzip, on it.  You
can't even add a configure-time check for it, since the builder's
environment may not be the end user's.  It is an error of much GNU
software to assume that the end user IS the builder and installer.

Martin

