Subject: bug#28601: 26.0.50; configure: error: Emacs does not support 'x86_64-pc-msys' systems.

From: Eli Zaretskii <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 08 Nov 2017 18:05:15 +0200

> From: Noam Postavsky <[email-masked]>
> Cc: Glenn Morris <[email-masked]>,  Eli Zaretskii <[email-masked]>,  [email-masked], Francis Wright <[email-masked]>, Stephen Leake <[email-masked]>, Phillip Lord <[email-masked]>, Fabrice Popineau <[email-masked]>
> Date: Tue, 07 Nov 2017 21:37:41 -0500
> 
> Trying to consolidate recent bug-gnus-emacs and emacs-devel discussion
> about this.

Thanks.

> -Note also that we need to disable Imagemagick because Emacs does not yet
> -support it on Windows.
> +Note also that we need to disable Imagemagick and DBUS because Emacs
> +does not yet support them on Windows.

I think the correct spelling is D-Bus, no?

> +** Check your $PATH
> +
> +When building Emacs, you should have /mingw64/bin in $PATH, such that running
> +
> +    which gcc
> +
> +gives '/mingw64/bin/gcc'.
> +
> +** Check your $PKG_CONFIG_PATH
> +
> +It should start with '/mingw64/lib/pkgconfig'.

You are talking to Windows users here, they might not be familiar with
the Unix shell's $FOO syntax.  So I suggest to be more explicit here,
something like

  ** Check your PATH environment variable

Also, there are native Windows ports of 'which', so I suggest to say
explicitly that "which gcc" should be invoked from the MSYS Bash
command line (and if so, why not use "type gcc" instead?).  Otherwise,
the report by 'which' might be in a very different form, because
/mingw64 is not a real Windows file name.

(Btw, on my system, "type gcc" from Bash says "/d/usr/bin/gcc", and
there's nothing wrong with my installation.  So this advice could be
okay for the newbies, but if the value is different, it doesn't yet
mean the installation is wrong.  I'm just saying.)

> +** Check your MSYS2 fstab file

I don't understand why this part is necessary.  AFAIR, fstab is set up
by the MSYS installer, and if it doesn't have the correct entries,
nothing will really work.  So I think this problem can only happen if
someone manually tinkers with their fstab, and if so, they should know
what they are doing.  Asking people to look there runs the risk of
them deciding that the value is somehow incorrect, and editing it to
completely ruin their MSYS installation.  FWIW, I have _never_ needed
to look at that file, in all the years I have an actively maintained
and used MSYS installation.

So I think this is best skipped.

Thanks again for working on this, and thanks to everyone else who
contributed to this discussion.