Re: [h-e-w] MSYS bash shell in Emacs?

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: "David Vanderschel" <address@hidden>
> Date: Sun, 26 Jun 2011 14:24:52 -0500
> 
> Is it worth trying to get the bash shell provided with MSYS to 
> run as a shell in Emacs?

IMO, no.  It's probably possible, given enough tinkering, but why
would you want to?  Emacs on Windows can do just fine without Bash; if
you have features that don't work without that, please tell the
details.

Anyway, MSYS is just a fork of Cygwin.  Its main purpose is to allow
MinGW developers run Unix configure scripts to configure GNU software
for being built with MinGW.  Once the configure script ran, MSYS's job
is done, and you are not supposed to need it anymore.  In fact, the
MSYS developers advise to stay away of MSYS _except_ for running the
configure scripts.

MSYS Bash is known to have a few idiosyncrasies that could cause
subtle but hard to understand issues, because they employ all kinds of
tricks whose sole purpose is to run Unix shell scripts correctly, but
which make little sense otherwise.  That is why we don't recommend
using it for building Emacs, for example: people actually tried that
and got burned.

> 0. Using Emacs's compile command.

Works without Bash.

> 1. Allowing Emacs to handle error reports out of gcc, so that 
> Emacs will take you straight to the code line of a reported 
> problem.

This works without any Bash.  If you tried and it didn't, please show
the details.

> 2. Running gdb in Emacs.

This also works without any Bash.  I do it all the time.

I have yet to see any Emacs features that needs Bash on Windows.