Re: MinGW build on master fails with Error 127

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Óscar Fuentes <ofv@wanadoo.es>
> Cc: emacs-devel@gnu.org
> Date: Sun, 25 Dec 2022 03:46:50 +0100
> 
> Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:
> 
> > Fixes for stale and outdated URLs will be appreciated.
> 
> I fixed the URLs and simplified the instructions a bit.

Thanks.  (Please in the future make sure to leave two spaces between
sentences.)

This part is unclear:

  ** Download and install MinGW-w64 and MSYS2

  Go to https://msys2.org and follow the instructions.  It is not
  necessary to install the packages suggested on those instructions.

What does the last sentence mean? which packages are unnecessary?
Some of them, all of them?

Also, it looks like msys2.org tells users to install the UCRT64
variety of MinGW, whereas you said earlier that INSTALL.W64 points to
the MSVCRT variety.  Should we say something about this in the
Download and Install sections?

> Some problems remain:
> 
> * There are references to past emacs versions.

I fixed that, but I honestly don't see how this is important.  They
are just examples.

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

Fixed.

> * 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.")

Fixed.

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

Fixed

> * libgccjit is missing on the list of dependencies.

Please tell how to modify the pacman command to add libgccjit.

> * ...probably more...

Feel free to fix.  I don't use MinGW64, so I cannot do that myself.

> >> 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.

If by "packages" you mean the optional libraries, I agree to a point.
But what I meant was the development and build environment, which
includes GCC/Binutils, MSYS with all the related tools, Git, etc.
This comes OOTB on Posix hosts, but not on Windows.  Most problems
people have building Emacs on Windows are due to their environment
being incomplete or misconfigured, especially since the tools are not
native Windows tools, and some need a certain state of mind that
Windows users might lack.