Re: MinGW build on master fails with Error 127

[Óscar Fuentes]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

>> > And the MinGW64 folks now informed me that MinGW64 switched to
>> > Windows 10 as the default target about a year ago.  See
>> >
>> >   
>> > https://github.com/msys2/MINGW-packages/issues/14573#issuecomment-1364569522
>> >
>> > Which in practice means building with MinGW64 on versions of
>> > MS-Windows older than 10 is no longer safe ore recommended.
>> >
>> > I updated the installation instructions and PROBLEMS to that effect.
>> 
>> As I just commented on the Github discussion, MinGW-w64 just set the
>> configure-time default for the target OS version. It still supports
>> previous versions. Also, MinGW-w64 distributes source, while MSYS2
>> distributes binaries. And the MinGW-w64 binaries distributed by MSYS2
>> sets the target OS version to 8.1
>
> And as I just replied there, in this case the default targets very
> soon becomes the de-facto minimum supported target.  And since that
> change in MinGW64 was done almost a year ago, it is reasonable to
> assume that it propagated to all the important MinGW64 packages, and
> thus to Emacs.

That's not how it works. When the MinGW-w64 "binary" (*) package is
built, MSYS2 sets the target (8.1 at the time of writing.) This setting
is frozen on the build products. This means that the MinGW-w64 package
distributed by MSYS2 will require 8.1 and will impose that requirement
on packages that link to it and, probably, also on packages that were
built with it (because of inlines or macros.)

* The package actually contains dlls, import libraries and header files,
  so it is both a bin and a dev package in Debian's pseudo-parlance.