Subject: W32 Binaries should have a top-level directory

From: [email-masked] (Phillip Lord)
Date: Mon, 07 Mar 2016 21:12:48 +0000

I've just noticed that between 24.3 and 24.4 the directory structure of
the W32 binaries has changed significantly, and now lacks a top-level
directory. Instead, they have the unix style /var, /share, /bin
directories.

I have discussed the issue with Eli who thinks this is right, and
briefly summarise the reasons and my objections here.

1) It's a standard way of distributing MinGW binaryes

2) You can unpack a latter version on top of an existing version, and
run multiple versions without fiddling with PATH.

My counter is:

1) Having no top-level directory is fairly unexpected for software
containing zip file (outside of a package management system). For
example, the Emacs W-64 binaries on Sourceforge have a top-level Emacs
directory.

2) A top-level directory makes it easily to remove things again
afterwards.

3) The windows Emacs distribution now has no obvious README or COPYING
notice -- this cannot go top-level, without a top-level directory.

I would suggest that future Emacs zip files contain a top-level
directory with the same name as the zip file, underneath which comes
/var, /share, /bin, plus README.W32, plus COPYING. This still makes it
easily to install over an existing distribution with a copy command.