Cygwin or MinGW? [was Re: [h-e-w] Cygwin and MS-DOS style paths]

[Robert A. Lerche]

I have been experimenting with using MinGW and MSYS rather than Cygwin in
conjunction with NTEmacs.  With a little bit of effort it works
fairly well although installation is not for the faint of heart.

The current version of MinGW/MSYS does not have an automated
installer.  This makes it a bit difficult but I got it working.  I
don't have access to my setup right now; if anyone wants I'll be happy
to post a list of the necessary downloads on Monday.  Once everything
is installed filename completion, ediff and grep-find work just fine.

There are a few grisly details: getting filename completion to
work requires cygwin-mount.el and a customization to make filenames
with spaces work with bash used for shell-mode.  Again, if anyone's
interested I'll post my solution.

The one unsolved problem I have is using utilities that read directly
from a tty inside a shell-mode buffer.  I believe this is a
long-standing issue and I would love to hear any advice about
resolving it in general.  In particular, openssl when prompting for a
passphrase fails.  openssh works, but is a little bit confusing
because prompts from a remote system do not appear (along with a
warning about "not a tty").