Re: "Best" way to run on Windows XP

[Lennart Borgman <lennart.borgman.073@student.lu.se>]

Eli Zaretskii wrote:

>>From: David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>
>>Date: Sun, 24 Jul 2005 18:47:43 +0200
>>
>>I think native build plus MSYS <URL:http://www.mingw.org/msys.shtml>
>>is a pretty good combination, but I have not actively tried it myself,
>>not being a Windows user.
>>    
>>
>
>AFAIK, MSYS is not a full suite of ports, its purpose is to provide an
>environment for running configure scripts.  Also, it has some
>Cygwin-style maladies which could be a pain on Windows (for example,
>Diff uses binary I/O, and thus compares files different when they only
>differ in their end-of-line format, Newline vs CRLF).
>  
>
I have been playing with MSYS a bit and I strongly agree with Eli that 
there unfortunately are some problems currently using MSYS. The 
compression built into Emacs (jka) is another example where the handling 
of end-of-line in MSYS makes it impossible to use. (I hope this one is 
cured in very soon.)

There also currently seems to be a bug in MSYS sh parameter handling 
which causes trouble.

However if these bugs where corrected and MSYS changed the end-of-line 
handling (for example for diff) I think it would be very good to use 
with Emacs.  Until then it is much easier to use the GnuWin32 tools 
(which however unfortunately misses a sh).

And actually, the situation is more complicated than that. For some 
things you want to do you need a sh. Currently MSYS is the easiest way 
to get that. In those situations you have to switch to the MSYS 
environments for those things and then switch back to the GnuWin32 
tools. Not very convinient indeed!