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

[Dani Moncayo]

> 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.


>> And finally, here is and updated version of my recipe to build Emacs on 
>> Windows:
>
> Sorry, but I see no need to recommend MSYS just to have 3 programs.
> MSYS is tricky to install if you already have a native MinGW
> development environment, because you need to keep them separate (due
> to incompatible features), but still let MSYS invoke MinGW programs,
> such as the compiler and the linker.  Setting this up is not for a
> casual user.  Downloading a single GnuWin32 package is much simpler.

I've talking about the msys package that is part of MinGW.  It is
trivial to install together with MinGW, because, as I say, is part of
it (it's a package):

  C:\>mingw-get list msys

  Package: msys-base                                       Subsystem: msys
  Components: bin

  A Basic MSYS Installation (meta)
  --------------------------------

  This meta package contains the components necessary to create  a  basic,
  small,  but  relatively  useful  MSYS installation. It includes the core
  system, bash, various command line utilities, and  archiving/compression
  tools.  It  attempts  to replicate, with certain judicious additions and
  deletions, the set  of  tools  originally  installed  by  the  old  MSYS
  monolithic installers.

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

-- 
Dani Moncayo