Re: Problems building CVS Emacs on Windows XP using MinGW

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: Francis Litterio <flitterio@gmail.com>
> Date: Fri, 22 Aug 2008 19:27:44 -0400
> Gcc: nnfolder:sent-usenet
> 
> I'll still collect the info that Eli asked for else-thread

Thanks.

> but let me say that the machine on which I'm having the build
> problems was setup by my company's IT department, and may have been
> _upgraded_ from Windows 2000 instead of getting a fresh XP install.
> For instance, Windows is installed in C:\WINNT instead of
> C:\WINDOWS.
> 
> As well, my company's draconian firewall prevents the machine from
> getting automatic updates from Microsoft.  Instead, a small subset of
> updates are distributed from an internal WSUS server.
> 
> So I suspect the problematic machine has a bizarre mixture of old and
> new system software on it and is incompletely patched.

I don't think the level of system up-to-dateness is an issue here, at
least not in general.  One of the machines where I frequently build
CVS Emacs has updates completely turned off, and with the exception of
a couple of updates that were important to me (e.g., the DST rules in
time zones), it is the original SP2 as it was rolled out in 2003.

In any case, whatever weird thing causes these failures, I'd like to
understand how in the world it could cause Emacs fail in such a
strange way.  Some memory-related thing (e.g., insufficient memory or
maybe even a hardware-related glitch) is about my only guess at this
point.  But I'm not good at guessing these sorts of things.