Re: [feature/internal-msys] thoughts of a more function windows package

[Óscar Fuentes]

Phillip Lord <phillip.lord@russet.org.uk> writes:

> Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:
>
>>> > They mostly work, until they don't.  Like with Cygwin, there are
>>> > subtle incompatibilities, mainly in file names and in communications
>>> > with subprocesses and response to "signals".  Encoding defaults are
>>> > also different.
>>> 
>>> That's true for the msys2 commands but not the mingw64 ones?
>>
>> Yes.  That's why I asked about msys-1.0.dll: the programs that depend
>> on that aren't mingw64 (native) programs.
>
>
> But, mingw64 does not have all the packages I need.

Ok, here goes a data point:

> How do people use Emacs on windows?

I install MSYS2 and execute a shell script that installs this packages:

universal-ctags-git ag putty-ssh aspell aspell-en aspell-es diffutils

(the scripts prepends the names listed above with the corresponding
mingw-w64-i686/x86_64 prefix). Then I install emacs with `pacman`,
either from MSYS2 binary repository or from the packages I build.

> I mean, do they install find,

I don't use it. I don't use it on GNU/Linux either (I work 99% of the
time on GNU/Linux).

> ls,

Is it necessary?

> git,

Git for Windows.

> aspell

See above.

> and all the rest by hand?

On my case, only Git for Windows and MSYS2 are installed by hand.

BTW, Git for Windows is also based on MSYS2: it installs the required
pieces that are required for running the parts of git that still depend
on POSIX.

It theory, instead of Git for Windows I could also run MSYS2's own
git.exe setting magit-git-executable and vc-git-program, without adding
MSYS2 /bin directory to PATH, but last time I tried it was somewhat
slower than Git for Windows, which is slow enough itself. Also, the
later comes with some goodies built-in, such as git-svn. MSYS2 git
package requires about 30 MB, while Git for Windows 240.

I execute runemacs.exe from wathever/msys64/mingw64/bin. emacs.el sets
PATH and exec-path:

(defun anade-a-path (path)
  (setenv "PATH" (concat (getenv "PATH") path-separator dir))
  (setq exec-path (append exec-path (list dir))))

(anade-a-path (file-name-directory (car command-line-args)))

With this I can execute programs on emacs.exe directory (that is,
whatever/msys64/mingw64/bin) with no problems.