Re: MinGW build on master fails with Error 127

[Óscar Fuentes]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

>> I fixed the URLs and simplified the instructions a bit.
>
> Thanks.  (Please in the future make sure to leave two spaces between
> sentences.)

Uh! Sorry.

> 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?

The packages mentioned on msys2.org either are the "wrong" ones (UCRT64)
or are already listed on INSTALL.W64.

> Also, it looks like msys2.org tells users to install the UCRT64
> variety of MinGW,

Yes, UCRT64 is the variety recommended by the MSYS2 team since recently.

> whereas you said earlier that INSTALL.W64 points to
> the MSVCRT variety.  Should we say something about this in the
> Download and Install sections?

That's already solved as our instructions direct the user to the MINGW64
shell and the packages on our list are the mingw-w64-x86_64-* variety.

>> 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 impression I got from that document is that the user will tend to
type commands verbatim.

>> * libgccjit is missing on the list of dependencies.
>
> Please tell how to modify the pacman command to add libgccjit.

Add the package mingw-w64-x86_64-libgccjit.

>> 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.

Last time I installed Debian I had to explicitly install gcc, binutils,
git, make... Indeed, figuring out the library dependencies is the worst
part by far, but AFAIK many GNU/Linux nowadays do not install a
development toolchain by default.

Don't get me wrong, INSTALL.W64 is nice to have. But I'm puzzled by it
providing so much specific detail while for other platforms we don't
even have a list of library names, much less the package names they are
distributed on popular distributions.