Re: Emacs 26.1 on Windows is HUGE

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: phillip.lord@russet.org.uk (Phillip Lord)
> Cc: help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org
> Date: Tue, 30 Apr 2019 22:13:57 +0100
> 
> >> https://github.com/msys2/MINGW-packages/issues/631
> >
> > Wow, 4 years!
> >
> > I think they should be told about the trailing colon feature, maybe
> > that will help them fix the problem.  Or not.
> 
> 
> Or not, am afraid.
> 
> The fix is very simple. INFOPATH is set in /etc/profile.

And /etc/profile didn't come with the MSYS installation?  It's a file
you concocted?  If the file comes with the installation, then MSYS are
the ones who need to fix it.

> But, Emacs will ignore the final colon regardless. The code is
> below. The problem is we match against path-separator which is ";" not
> ":", so we never do the `append'.

??? You mean MSYS2 Bash doesn't convert the colons to semi-colons (and
the /d/foo/bar file names to Windows d:\foo\bar) when they pass
INFOPATH to native MS-Windows programs?  That's a terrible bug.  Doing
these conversions are the main reason for MSYS existence, and the main
difference between it and Cygwin.

Do they perform these conversion on PATH?

>   However you set INFOPATH, if its last character is a colon (on
>   MS-DOS/MS-Windows systems, use a semicolon instead), this is replaced
>   by the default (compiled-in) path. This gives you a way to augment the
>   default path with new directories without having to list all the
>   standard places.
> 
> Both Emacs and the Info documentation are wrong, I think, since they
> assume the path seperator for environment variables on MS-Windows
> systems in ";" which isn't true in general.

No, the path separator on Windows is _always_ semi-colon.  Emacs and
our docs are right, and MSYS should be fixed.