Re: Texinfo 7.1.90 on mingw

[Bruno Haible]

Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> MinGW programs are stand-alone native Windows executables.  But the
> MinGW development environment includes MSYS Bash and MSYS ports of
> various GNU utilities, ...

It is *one* of the possible development environment for mingw. [1]

However, I cannot recommend it because it shows several weird
behaviours at its very core and by design [2][3].

> Cygwin comes with its own versions of Bash and the associated
> utilities, but they do not cater to MinGW programs by making, behind
> the scenes, the few adaptations that allow running native Windows
> programs from a Posix environment.  As a simple example,
> colon-separated PATH gets converted to semi-colon separated when MSYS
> Bash invokes a MinGW program

Cygwin does a similar thing; not inside bash but inside its fork+exec()
system calls (which bash uses, of course). [4]

Without that, like you say, no MinGW program could
ever find executables and shared libraries by searching PATH.

Bruno

[1] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-gnulib/2024-07/msg00047.html
[2] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-gnulib/2019-11/msg00021.html
[3] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-gnulib/2019-11/msg00025.html
[4] cygwin/winsup/cygwin/environ.cc, variable conv_envvars