Building Emacs on Windows with MinGW+MSYS (was: Emacs pretest 24.0.90)

[Dani Moncayo <dmoncayo@gmail.com>]

>> If it is possible, I'd like to know the exact steps involved in such
>> weekly builds (in order to learn and try to reproduce them in my
>> system).
>
> nt/INSTALL should have all required information. If not, please file a
> bug detailing what is missing.

While reading that file, I've tried something that it suggests: to use
"mingw32-make" as the make tool.  To my delight, it worked flawlessly!

So, it's possible to build Emacs on Windows using _exclusively_ the
utilities provided by MinGW, with its MSYS package included (it
supplies necessary utilities like rm or cp).

Thus, I suggest an update of the file nt/INSTALL. In particular, the
last sentence of this paragraph:

  MSYS sh.exe also appears to cause
  various problems, e.g., it is known to cause failures in commands
  like "cmd /c FOO" in the Makefiles, because it thinks "/c" is a
  Unix-style file name that needs conversion to the Windows format.
  If you have MSYS installed, try "make SHELL=cmd.exe" to force the
  use of cmd.exe instead of the MSYS sh.exe.

The solution proposed there doesn't seem to work (at least for me).  I
would change it for another one that suggested using "mingw32-make"
instead of "make".

----------------

And finally, here is and updated version of my recipe to build Emacs on Windows:

0. Prerequisites:
0.1. Install bzr (if you are going to pull the sources from a bzr branch).
0.2. Install MinGW (with the MSYS package).
0.3. Create a file "mingw-console.cmd" with the content described in [a].

1. Get the sources you want to build from ("bzr pull" or your favorite way).
2. Invoke the "mingw-console.cmd" script (to open a console where
we'll run the following commands).
3. run "cd C:\emacs\trunk\nt". [b].
4. run "configure --without-xpm --without-png --without-jpeg
--without-tiff --without-gif".
5. run "mingw32-make bootstrap".
6. run "mingw32-make info".
7. run "mingw32-make install".

That's all, folks!


--- Footnotes: ---

[a] File "mingw-console.cmd":
------ begin of file -----------------------------
@set PATHMINGW=C:\MinGW\bin;C:\MinGW\msys\1.0\bin
@set PATHBAZAAR=C:\Program Files (x86)\Bazaar
@set PATH=%PATHMINGW%;%PATHBAZAAR%;%PATH%
@cmd
------ end of file -------------------------------
Substitute:
* "C:\MinGW" with the directory where you've installed mingw(+msys).
* "C:\Program Files (x86)\Bazaar" with the directory where you've
installed bazaar.

[b] Substitute "C:\emacs\trunk" with the directory where you've got
the emacs source tree.


-- 
Dani Moncayo