Re: Emacs vista build failures

[David Kastrup]

"Lennart Borgman (gmail)" <address@hidden> writes:

> Alfred M. Szmidt wrote:
>
>> Exactly, wouldn't it be just easier to request the user to install
>> whatever POSIX shell that is required in INSTALL or similar?
>
> There is a POSIX shell for w32, but I do not think that interact well
> with normal w32 command line programs. Is there anyone who knows
> something about that?

MSYS is basically a boxed set of everything you'll likely need for
autoconf (modulo compilers).  We recommend using it with AUCTeX.  It
turns out that it still makes a formidable chore for most people to
install all that and call autoconf, configure, make and so on.

It also happens to be frustratingly hard to write shell, m4 and Makefile
code that is immune to backslashes, spaces in file and directory names
and similar.

And since a typical installation target is
"C:\Documents and Settings\dak\My Programs", you get hit with a lot of
madness by default that could theoretically also occur under Posix-like
systems but usually doesn't (of course, with the advent of MacOSX
and GNOME and other GUI stuff, people tend to become less worried about
using weird characters nowadays, so it's just a matter of time).

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum