RE: [h-e-w] Cant run ediff

[Bingham, Jay]

I am having the same problem.  I have installed cygwin and the problem
persists.  So there is more to making this work than just installing
cygwin.  I have tried adding the path to the variable diff-command, this
has not produced any different results.  So my question is once you have
cygwin installed how do you tell emacs that it is there?  I have looked
through the documentation on cygwin and have not found any mention of
how this would be accomplished, nor can I find information in the emacs
info pages (I did not really expect there to be any thing there since
this is a problem peculiar to emacs on Windows).  The FAQ for emacs in
windows does not have any information that I found useful.  All it says
is to get cygwin and install it.

J_)
C_)ingham
.    COMPAQ NonStop Integrity Systems
.    Austin, TX
. Language is the apparel in which your thoughts parade in public.
. Never clothe them in vulgar and shoddy attire. -Dr. George W. Crane-

 -----Original Message-----
From:   Stephen Leake [mailto:address@hidden 
Sent:   Wednesday, 12 December, 2001 8:47 a
To:     Andreas Bernhard
Cc:     address@hidden
Subject:        Re: [h-e-w] Cant run ediff

Andreas Bernhard <address@hidden> writes:

> I have been forced to make the painful transition from a Unix to a
Windows
> platform and am happily running windows emacs. If I run ediff via the
emacs
> command line or from the pull-down menu I get the message: "no such
file or
> directory ediff", although diff and ediff files do reside in my
emacs/lisp
> directory. I have included that directory in the search path in my
.emacs
> file: (setq load-path (cons  "c:/Program Files/emacs/lisp" load-path
)). I am
> running 21.1.1
> 
> What am I missing or doing incorrectly? Do I need to download
additional
> files? Thank you for your assistance, Sincerely, AndyIII

Emacs ediff relies on an external program "diff" to do some of the
work. When I take my "diff" out of my path, I get the error message
"Searching for program: no such file or directory, diff". (note the
last word is "diff", not "ediff"). 

So I suspect this is your problem. You need to get a "diff" program.

One easy way to do this is to install the Cygwin tools, from
http://sources.redhat.com/cygwin/. This is a very complete and robust
set of Gnu and other tools. They all rely on a base DLL that emulates
some Unix functionality on top of Windows. For example, this permits
mounting directories, and allows Unix-style forward slash in paths.

Another choice is the mingw32 build of Gnu tools, from
http://unxutils.sourceforge.net/. I have not tried those yet; they do
not use an emulation layer, so they are more "Windows-like". For
example, the tools require Windows-style back slash in paths (although
even Windows is allowing forward slash in some situations).

Good luck!

-- 
-- Stephe