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

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> Date: Thu, 13 Oct 2011 23:01:22 +0200
> From: Dani Moncayo <dmoncayo@gmail.com>
> Cc: emacs-devel@gnu.org, Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>
> 
> 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).

If you use the MinGW Make, then the only tools you need from MSYS are
cp, mv, and rm.  It makes no sense to install MSYS for these 3
programs.  Just install the GnuWin32 Coreutils, and be done.

> 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).

Probably because you tried it with MSYS Make.  That solution will only
work with the MinGW Make.

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

Sorry, but I see no need to recommend MSYS just to have 3 programs.
MSYS is tricky to install if you already have a native MinGW
development environment, because you need to keep them separate (due
to incompatible features), but still let MSYS invoke MinGW programs,
such as the compiler and the linker.  Setting this up is not for a
casual user.  Downloading a single GnuWin32 package is much simpler.