Re: MinGW build on master fails with Error 127

[Óscar Fuentes]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

>> > Does the wording in nt/INSTALL.W64 guide users to only one of these
>> > two variants (and if so, to which one), or is it generic, and the user
>> > will have to choose when they install MinGW?
>> 
>> It definitively points to the MINGW64 variant (the traditional one that
>> uses MSVCRT *and* runs on x86_64) because it lists the packages with the
>> mingw-w64-x86_64- prefix.
>
> OK, that's good.
>
>> A cursory look also shows some important problems with that document.
>> For instance, gives a link to download the MSYS2 installer instead of
>> directing the user to the MSYS2 project webpage (msys2.org). That link
>> is no longer valid.
>
> Fixes for stale and outdated URLs will be appreciated.

I fixed the URLs and simplified the instructions a bit. Some problems
remain:

* There are references to past emacs versions.

* The instructions for getting Emacs' sources via git create a versioned
  emacs directory when in fact the user is checking out master.

* The instructions for building from the tarball are mixed with the
  instructions for building from git. They use different names for the
  root source directory and there are expressions that might confuse the
  unexperienced user (there is a mention to "development sources" where
  those are previously referred as "the Git repository.")

* The --prefix parameter passed to `configure' will cause Emacs to be
  installed in the source directory.

* libgccjit is missing on the list of dependencies.

* ...probably more...

>> In general, I don't know why we (Emacs) make the effort of providing so
>> much guidance for building under MSYS2 when no similar level of detail
>> is provided for Debian, Fedora, Cygwin, etc.
>
> The Windows users typically need to do more to arrange for a working
> build environment than users on Posix hosts.

By large, the worst part of building Emacs is to figure out the packages
you need to install. That's equally difficult for most GNU/Linux
distributions as for MSYS2.