Subject: bug#18823: 24.4; Built-in support on MS-Windows for visiting compressed files

From: Eli Zaretskii <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 25 Oct 2014 12:27:08 +0300

> Date: Sat, 25 Oct 2014 11:17:11 +0200
> From: Dani Moncayo <[email-masked]>
> 
> Currently, on MS-Windows, if gzip.exe is not available at run time, it
> is not possible to visit .gz files.  So, for example, it is not possible
> to read any info manual from a binary distribution made with a plain
> "make install".
> 
> But it seems that limitation could be removed [1].  Hence this request
> for having built-in support on MS-Windows for displaying compressed
> files.

I don't think there's anything Windows-specific here: AFAIK Emacs
requires 'gzip' for visiting compressed files on all supported
systems, including Unix and GNU systems.  It's just that on Posix
hosts the probability of 'gzip' being installed is much higher, though
not 100% AFAIK.

So I think the requested feature could be reworded as follows: enhance
jka-compr to support internal decompression methods such as
zlib-decompress-region.