bug#12955: 24.3.50; Build process on MS-Windows: sometimes needs "human intervention"

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> Date: Thu, 22 Nov 2012 20:16:18 +0100
> From: Dani Moncayo <dmoncayo@gmail.com>
> Cc: 12955@debbugs.gnu.org
> 
> > I don't quite understand your line of thinking.  If there is an
> > annoyance here (I don't see it), then it is self-imposed, because you
> > are deliberately using an unsupported environment -- unsupported
> > _precisely_ because of problems like this one.
> 
> I thought it was supported, since the makefiles do care about
> SHELLTYPE being CMD or SH, and since the build process work just fine
> with SH (modulo the problem at hand).

The SH part is not for MSYS.  It's for Cygwin Bash.  It also worked
with the old port of zsh, which I used for some time.

> The restriction is preventing the use of the SH shell.  And those two
> programs are included in the msys-base package of MinGW, which I find
> very convenient and easy to install (with its package manager).

Installing the GnuWin32 port of Coreutils is equally easy.

> > I would like to find a good solution now.  Does it work for you to get
> > rid of the "cmd /c" part entirely and remove the quotes, i.e. use
> > this:
> >
> >         fc.exe /b gl-tmp globals.h >nul 2>&1 || $(CP) gl-tmp globals.h
> >
> > ?  (Note the ".exe" part, it's important because "fc" is a shell
> > builtin in Bash.)  If "/b" causes the same trouble as "/c" in the cmd
> > command, we can make a Make variable, set to "//b" under MSYS and to
> > "/b" otherwise.  MSYS can be recognized by having MSYSTEM in the
> > environment (Make converts all environment variables to Make
> > variables, so you can use ifdef etc.).
> 
> Yes that seems to work for me.  I've tested both cases (SH and CMD).

I committed a variant of that in trunk revision 110989.  Please test.

> > If you or someone else wants to
> > work on such an MSYS build, _that_ would be a worthy investment of
> > time and energy, and an excellent use of MSYS the way MSYS is supposed
> > to be used.  When used that way, MSYS really shines.
> >
> > If you are willing to work on the MSYS build, I promise you all the
> > support I can give.  Otherwise, you really should start migrating to
> > cmd.
> 
> I'm kind of a novice in these matters, but if you give me some
> guidelines to get started and I find enough time, I'd like to learn
> and try to help.

Thanks for the offer.