Re: [h-e-w] Fwd: Re: Control frame size on startup from .emacs

[Jason Rumney]

Neil J Mackie wrote:

> I'm a long standing emacs user, from 1990, and I have been on various 
> emacs mailing lists throughout that time. I'm not familiar with how 
> the various flavours of emacs (gnuemacs, xemacs, ntemacs) have evolved 
> during that time so I dont know how emacs for Windows is currently 
> developing/developed. However I am _very_ concerned about the trend 
> recently to introduce the use of features of the Windows OS to emacs, 
> examples are the use of registry keys and installers.
There is no intention to force the use of installers and registry keys
on users of the released version of Emacs. The installer, if/when
integrated with the official build, will be an optional extra, which
many users will prefer over the current zipfile. Current installers are
"third party" extras, which are wrappers for the official build and CVS
snapshot of Emacs. They are maintained seperately by their respective
authors, though one author has approached the Emacs developers about
integrating it with the official build in future (this will probably
happen after the 22.1 release, since the Emacs CVS has theoretically
been in a feature freeze for the last year and we would prefer not to
introduce something major like this now).

Registry keys were introduced a long time ago (maybe by the Microsoft
developers who did the original port, or at least by Geoff Voelker who
maintained it for many years following that), and for some time Emacs
depended on certain registry keys to find its directories (it may have
been possible to use environment variables instead, but setting that up
was poorly documented, and required quite a bit of manual work). Only
recently (20.x) was Emacs changed so it could figure out sensible
defaults for itself if those registry keys were missing. There is no
plan to go back to the old days of requiring registry keys to run Emacs.
Most likely the default for HOME will get tweaked slightly in future to
make some of the registry settings that are being discussed in the
context of installers unneccesary.