Subject: bug#19989: 25.0.50; Build instructions on Windows

From: Eli Zaretskii <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 08 Mar 2015 18:59:37 +0200

> Date: Sun, 8 Mar 2015 09:04:19 -0700
> From: Ilya Zakharevich <[email-masked]>
> Cc: [email-masked]
> 
> >  . In which directory do you have the MinGW gcc.exe?
> 
> It is in
>       FOO/bin/gcc.exe
> When bash --login is started with an empty path, this one is on
>       /mingw/bin/gcc.exe
> (due to my symlink of MSYS’s /mingw to the native directory FOO).
> 
> >  Please make a
> >    point of showing its full absolute directory file name, both as
> >    seen by Windows native programs and by MSYS Bash.  Please do NOT
> >    substitute those stupid FOO placeholders, because they interfere
> >    with understanding the problem.
> 
> Irrelevant.  You may think that FOO is f:/oo — it would be least
> confusing.  Otherwise, if you want to confuse yourself MUCH more, FOO
> is
> 	k:/get/emacs-build/mingw-get
> 
> >  . In which directory do you have the "wrong" gcc.exe?  Please provide
> >    the same details about that as for the MinGW gcc.exe.
> 
> This IS absolutely irrelevant.  Moreover, it was in many different
> directories on different tries.  All that is important is that it was
> on PATH when
>     bash --login
> was started.
> 
> >  . What is the full value of PATH, in MSYS Bash and in the Windows
> >    cmd.exe shell?
> 
> When started with empty PATH, the first one is, as reported,
>   .:/usr/local/bin:/mingw/bin:/bin:/usr/gnu/bin:/usr/local/bin:/bin:/usr/bin:.
> The second one was, obviously, empty.
> 
> I won’t supply my default PATH for obvious reasons — and since it has
> no bearing on half of the cases reported (empty PATH), and is
> practically guaranteed to be irrelevant for the other half.

Sigh...  You still don't get it, do you?  You still look at the
information through the broken glass of your (mis)conception of what
happened, and decide what is relevant based on that.  That selective
reporting of important information is precisely what gets in the way
of understanding the issue efficiently and correctly.

If you don't tell me your directories and the full PATH, how am I
supposed to know which one is before the other?  Oh, I could start
asking all these questions one by one, but why should I?  Why couldn't
you provide that information as requested?  You want to obfuscate your
directories for privacy reasons -- be my guest, as long as you do that
consistently, and as long as each real directory is substituted with a
unique replacement string.  How hard can that be?

Also, you only told what was PATH in MSYS when it was empty outside.
Did you ever try without emptying the outside PATH?  If so, was the
directory with the MinGW gcc.exe on that PATH?

(And, btw, how exactly did you invoke Bash "with an empty PATH"?)

> >  . Which packages did you select in mingw-get when you downloaded
> >    MinGW and MSYS?  Please provide a full list of those, and please
> >    make sure to point out which were selected by default, and which
> >    ones weren't and you yourself selected them.
> 
> As reported, the only one for which I needed to put a manual checkmark
> was mingw32-base.  The rest of info is gone.

This part of the information can be restored if you run mingw-get
again and display the installed packages.  But don't bother, since I
already gleaned that from the list of directories you've shown.

And 2 more questions:

  . What does this command show, when you invoke it in the MSYS Bash
    shell:

     ls -l /etc/fstab*

  . How do you invoke the MSYS Bash? just "bash --login" from cmd.exe
    prompt, or in some other way (desktop shortcut or somesuch)?  If
    through a shortcut, what does the "Target" field of the shortcut's
    Properties say?