Re: Building Emacs from a new MinGW environment

[Dani Moncayo]

>>   Configured for `i686-pc-mingw32'.
>>
>>     Where should the build process find the source code?    
>> /home/dani/emacs/emacs.git
>
> No, this is already wrong: the source directory should be something
> like /c/msys/home/dani/emacs/emacs.git, i.e. the full Windows file
> name in MSYS format.  Something is still not working correctly.

Mmm, but I don't see what wrong with a path like
"/home/dani/whatever".  It is a perfectly legitimate MSYS path (like
"/c/msys/home/dani/whatever" or "c:/msys/home/dani/whatever"), isn't
it?

Why that should be the culprit of the lack of expansion of "%emacs_dir%"?

> Are you sure you restored the MSYS tools correctly?

Well, my MSYS is exactly the same I used many times for building my
Emacs binaries: the pre-packaged version from MinGW-builds released on
2013-05-15:
  http://sourceforge.net/projects/mingwbuilds/files/external-binary-packages/

IOW: the only thing that have changed wrt my previous build
environment (which compiled emacs successfully a couple of weeks ago)
is the MinGW part of the environment, which is now "handmade".

>  E.g., do you have
> dirname.exe and sed.exe in C:/MSYS/bin, and are those MSYS
> executables?

I think so:
  $ type -a dirname
  dirname is /bin/dirnam

  $ type -a sed
  sed is /bin/sed

>  Also, which version of MSYS Bash do you have?

$ bash --version
GNU bash, version 3.1.17(1)-release (i686-pc-msys)
Copyright (C) 2005 Free Software Foundation, Inc.

> The configure script computes the source directory in a fragment that
> starts with this comment:
>
>   # Find the source files, if location was not specified.
>
> Perhaps add 'echo' there in strategical places to see what is not
> working, and why.

At the end of that fragment (which begins with "# Find the source
files, if location was not specified."), srcdir holds "../emacs.git".
And looking at the configure script, I think that the fragment
responsible for making that path absolute is a bit later in the file.
It is a fairly simple and short fragment which begins with "#### Make
srcdir absolute, if it isn't already.".  I've seen that, after that
second fragment, "srcdir" holds its definitive value:
"/home/dani/emacs/emacs.git".

If you look at that code, you'll see that the "srcdir" variable can be
updated with either (a) the output of the "pwd" or (b) the contents of
the PWD variable.  But if I try those options in my MSYS bash, both
give me the same MSYS path "/home/dani/emacs/emacs.git".

Perhaps the key factor here is the fact that, in my case, the
directory holding the source code is inside the MSYS tree (under my
MSYS "home" directory).  I guess that in your case that directory is
outside the MSYS tree, so that its absolute path in MSYS has
necessarily the form "/X/some/dir" (where X is the letter of some
windows drive).

-- 
Dani Moncayo