Re: Trunk r117046 fails on systems with older automake

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: Andy Moreton <andrewjmoreton@gmail.com>
> Date: Wed, 07 May 2014 10:42:31 +0100
> 
> On Wed 07 May 2014, Paul Eggert wrote:
> 
> > The assumption is that people building from the repository are expert enough
> > to use the extra development tools required, and to set up their environments
> > so that these extra development tools work.  It shouldn't be rocket science,
> > and it shouldn't be unreasonable to expect development tools to be installed
> > correctly.  This particular problem seems isolated to Windows developers and I
> > expect they'll work it out among themselves.
> 
> This is exactly the problem - getting a working toolchain is
> considerably more difficult on Windows. There are several sets of
> incompatible toolchains, and no package manager to install anything. On
> other platforms (including Cygwin) this is easy.
> 
> The build requires two distinct sets of tools (msys for autotools and
> configure, mingw for building) which live in separate locations and have
> different filename translation schemes from posix style naming to the
> underlying Windows filesystem. On Windows installing development tools
> correctly *is* hard.

This is true (although the initial effort of establishing a working
build environment is largely a one-time thing).  However, you already
had such an environment, because AFAIK you were able to build the
trunk before.  So the only thing that was required by the latest
changes on the trunk was to install pkg-config and its macros in
pkg.m4, which doesn't sound like a catastrophe, or something too hard
to do.

Are you saying that there were additional problems, after pkg-config
was correctly set up?  If so, please describe them.

> It would seems from the current issues that Eli is almost the only
> developer successfully building for a Windows target from trunk.

There's no magic here: my MSYS/MinGW build environment is probably
more full than what you have, because I use it a lot, and have built a
lot more packages than just Emacs.  IOW, I bumped into those problems
and solved them long ago.  ("ls -l --time=c" tells me that I copied
pkg.m4 to the MSYS tree more than a year after installing pkg-config.)