On Sun, Oct 11, 2015 at 5:03 PM, Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> wrote:

> Do you see something that should be changed in nt/INSTALL to make such
> problems less probable?

When nt/INSTALL mentions automake/autoconf, perhaps there should be a note like your comment:

The MinGW packages of Autoconf and Automake are not useful, I suggest to remove them.

because if you're using the MinGW installer, it's quite easy to end with MinGW versions of these tools.