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Date: Thu, 12 Dec 1996 17:13:00 -0500
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From: Georg Nikodym <georgn@Canada.Sun.COM>
To: Steven L Baur <steve@miranova.com>
Cc: xemacs-beta@xemacs.org
Subject: Re: Distribution idea
In-Reply-To: <m2k9qntqjd.fsf@altair.xemacs.org>
References: <199612111850.NAA03282@nvwls.cc.purdue.edu>
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>>>>> "sb" == Steven L Baur <steve@miranova.com> writes:

>>>>> "Martin" == Martin Buchholz <mrb@eng.sun.com> writes:

 Martin> But in order to avoid creating a dependency on having gzip on
 Martin> the PATH, we need to do the gunzipping within code that is
 Martin> linked in to XEmacs.  This means that zlib would have to
 Martin> become a standard part of XEmacs. This would make XEmacs a
 Martin> little bigger (my libz.a is 67k). Who wants to implement it?

 sb> No.  You have to have gzip/gunzip to do anything meaningful with
 sb> the distribution tarfile (tar zxf still requires a gzip binary),
 sb> so I don't think a Makefile dependency on them is too much of a
 sb> hardship.

Well, funny you should mention this.

There is a tension between having stuff built into XEmacs and having
co-processes.  Building stuff into XEmacs makes it bigger.  Bigger
means fork(2)/exec(2) for co-processes take longer.  However building
things in adds to the already untenably large management load borne
largely by the maintainers.  However, fork(2)/exec(2) pairs from large
processes like XEmacs already take too long, so the customers want
integration...

This turns into the same kind of thing as government deficit
financing.  Pay now or pay later.

Of course, since deficits aren't eliminated overnight, and we won't
easily reddress the code bloat we work with daily, might I suggest
that the zlib stuff be made into a shared object that XEmacs can
dynamically link on demand...  I suspect that you'll find that this is
a little faster than fork/exec.

