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Subject: Re: gzip.exe as symlink breaks NTEmacs's jka-compr.el
In-Reply-To: Message from Randall R Schulz <rrschulz@cris.com>
   of "Tue, 16 Jul 2002 08:45:12 PDT." <5 DOT 1 DOT 0 DOT 14 DOT 2 DOT 20020716083826 DOT 01f845a0 AT pop3 DOT cris DOT com>
Date: Tue, 16 Jul 2002 20:18:26 -0500
From: Jon Cast <jcast AT ou DOT edu>

Randall R Schulz <rrschulz AT cris DOT com> wrote:
<snip>
> I may have missed something (please forgive me for not re-reading
> the thread), but why is a non-Cygwin program (NTEmacs) relying on a
> Cygwin tool?

Because Emacs is a Unix program.  It's been evolved to deliver very
nearly to full power of the Unix environment, and as such uses /many/
Unix tools.  Many of those tools are not easily available on Windows,
but if Emacs finds a copy of them, it'll use them anyway.  This is a
feature, not a bug.

> Surely it can be configured to use the correct one, right?

If there's a Windows gzip installed, you can customize Emacs to use
it.  But why install two gzips?

> If NTEmacs doesn't include it's own gzip / gunzip, then editing a
> compressed file wouldn't even be possible without Cygwin installed,

s/Cygwin/gzip/.  Of course you can't edit

> so it seems incumbent upon NTEmacs to deal with the challenges of
> doing so in their most generic form.

Why does Emacs have to work around this conceit that all the world
should be a Cygwin program, when /making gzip work from Emacs/ is so
much easier?  Consider: Cygwin is a Unix emulation environment, right?
So if every program was a Cygwin program, every program would be a
Unix program, and we could all use Unix.  Cygwin exists because some
people have to use Windows programs.  Ergo, Cygwin cannot pretend
Windows programs do not exist.

> There is, for example, the "readlink" command that resolves a Cygwin
> symbolic link.

> Randall Schulz
> Mountain View, CA USA

Jon Cast

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