Re: Bootstrap fails on w32

[Juanma Barranquero]

On 5/23/05, Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> wrote:

> As Jason pointed out, this would cause trouble to users who build
> released Emacs versions from Emacs tarballs.  Please let's not forget
> that people who get Emacs via CVS still aren't our main audience...

I read Jason's message after sending my own. OK, I asked for a real
reason and there's one, I can accept that :)

> Why ``fix'' that which isn't broken?  Emacs still supports platforms
> that are much older than Windows 9x, so I certainly don't see any
> reasons for such a crusade against W9x build capabilities, nor any
> reason to assume that no one builds Emacs on those old versions of
> Windows.

Well, Eli, "I'd suggest" is hardly a crusade, isn't it?

Anyway, I know nothing about these platforms older than Windows 9x;
perhaps they have still a significant number of followers. W9X users
there are lots, yeah, but most of them never compiled anything in the
first place, least yet something for which they would need to use Unix
tools like make, rm and cp (even if they compile Emacs with MSVC, they
would need some of the Unix tools).

The reason why I assume that not many (not "no one" as you say) people
builds on Emacs is that two or three years ago I did regularly, and
there were quite a few quirks. As recently as two weeks ago I tried to
do a MinGW build of Emacs on another person's machine, and came
nowhere (and judging by the amount of BuildingOnWThirtyTwo stuff on
the Emacs wiki, I'm not the only one who finds the process
complicate).

> Then I'd say get a better port of rm.exe.

I was led to believe MinGW/MSYS tools were good.

-- 
                    /L/e/k/t/u