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.
