bug#14361: Building guile 2.0.9 under mingw + msys

[Andy Wingo <wingo@pobox.com>]

On Tue 21 Jun 2016 14:46, Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

> I would be happier, though, if the patch for open-process, whose last
> version I submitted here:
>
>   https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guile-devel/2014-08/msg00015.html
>
> would be admitted to the repository, as it fixes important
> functionality that is currently unavailable in the MinGW build with
> upstream sources.  AFAIR, the last communication about this patch was
> here:
>
>   https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guile-devel/2014-08/msg00024.html
>   https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guile-devel/2014-08/msg00041.html
>
> I pinged about it a month later:
>
>   https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guile-devel/2014-09/msg00066.html
>
> but got no responses.

Let's give it a go!  I understand that you do not want to work with
gnulib.  That's a negative from a Guile POV -- but it's not a
deal-breaker.  The thing we like about Gnulib is that we like working
with POSIX abstractions as much as possible, and we find that it's
easier to do our work as Guile maintainers when we limit and reduce the
number of portability-related shims in our code.  To that end I hesitate
about including a bunch more stuff in posix.c.  Must it all be there, or
would it be possible to move some of it out to our own gnulib-like
mingw-w32.[ch] or something?

Andy