Subject: bug#15297: 24.3.50; Compression of installed .el files should be configurable

From: Ulrich Müller <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 7 Sep 2013 10:35:59 +0200

>>>>> On Sat, 07 Sep 2013, Eli Zaretskii wrote:

> What's wrong with

>   GZIP_PROG='' make install ...

> ?

That it doesn't work. ;-) Assignment in the Makefile overrides the
environment. ("make GZIP_PROG='' install" might work, though.)

> This way, you don't need to decide up front whether you will or will
> not want to compress, you decide at "make install" time.

I don't understand what would be the advantage of delaying the
decision. What additional information does the user have at install
time that he didn't have at configure time, and that would therefore
assist him with the decision? configure has the additional advantage
that things are remembered in the config.status file and in Emacs'
system-configuration-options variable, so you can recreate an
identical configuration from that.

Also, "configure --help" lists what options are available. But how
would the user discover that there is a GZIP_PROG variable? By reading
the Makefile? GZIP_PROG is at around line 260, not easy to find.

> If you want to disable compression of Lisp files, but leave alone the
> compression of Info files, then I think it is much better to introduce
> GZIP_LISP in the top-level Makefile.in without adding anything to the
> configure script.  Again, the advantage is that no decision need be
> made at configure time.

Having a configure option wouldn't prevent that. You can always
override the configure setting by passing a different setting of the
variable to "make install".