What's my stupid mistake with mingw?

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

With the talk of adding poll() support to NSRunLoop, I thought again of 
writing a mingw
implementation of NSRunLoop.  My old NT system is long dead, so I 
installed a new copy
of windoze-xp on one of my machines.

I then downloaded and installed the latest cygwin.

I then downloaded and installed the latest mingw (1.1).

I set my PATH to put the mingw bin directory first.

I renamed the mingw copy of the make program so that the cygwin make 
would be used.

I built/installed gnustep_make.

I tried running GNUstep.sh ... found that it fell over because under xp 
the path to a
users home directory has spaces in it ... modified GNUstep.sh to quote 
variables better
and fix that problem.

Then I checked the mingw documentation in the make package. It said I 
should install
libffcall next.  I fetched the 1.8c archive from the gnustep site ... 
but the
compile-mingw script mentioned in the documentation was not there.  I 
found it in an
email archive on the web and ran it.   It bombed out with the compile of 
avcall-i386.s
failing and complaining about "|invalid character '(' in mnemonic"

Now ... looking at the makefile, it seems to do some processing to 
convert avcall-i386.S
to avcall-i386.s
However, the filesystem is not case sensitive, so avcall-i386.S and 
avcall-i386.s are the
same file, and this preprocessing pass seems to be quietly failing  so 
that it has not been
done when we get round to trying to run the assembler.

What I can't see is how this could ever have built under windoze ... so 
I'm wondering if
I've missed something basic.

Any help appreciated.