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

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Fri, 14 Oct 2011 00:23:43 +0200
> From: Dani Moncayo <address@hidden>
> Cc: address@hidden, address@hidden
> 
> > 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.
> 
> In my case, it make sense, because MSYS gives me a useful set of tools
> beyond those three: diff, grep, find, touch, cat, ls and many more.

If you use those outside of Emacs, then this benefit is unrelated to
the issue at hand, which is what should be the best recommended way of
building Emacs on Windows.

If you use them from Emacs, then the same caveats apply about
file-name conversion done by MSYS tools.  The MSYS developers
themselves explicitly tell that these tools are not supposed to be
used for any purpose _except_ running the Posix configure scripts and
the Makefile's produced by those scripts, for the explicit goal of
building MinGW packages.  "Building", not "using".  So beware.

> I found it very handy, not only for building Emacs, but to have a
> "minimal system" for programming.

You are using MSYS out of its intended purpose, so it will bite you
some day.