Re: Emacs vista build failures

[Lennart Borgman (gmail)]

Jason Rumney wrote:
> Evans Winner wrote:
> > "Lennart Borgman (gmail)" <address@hidden>
> > writes:
> >  
> >     I presented (in this thread I believe) some of my
> >     arguments about why to care about w32 too in my reply to
> >     RMS about a portable mini-bash. I might be wrong, my
> >     arguments might be bad, but I tried to give some
> >     arguments.
> >
> > I don't know much about it, but isn't that what MinGW is
> > supposed to provide?
>
> I think Lennart's suggestion is about a having a small POSIX shell that
> can be bundled with Emacs (and other programs) to use on systems that do
> not have a POSIX shell by default. MinGW/MSYS is an external dependency
> which means an extra thing to go wrong for users.

Yes.

> I do think this idea presents a chicken and egg problem though - the
> shell is needed by configure, but will not be available until it has
> been built by a bootstrap.

Yes, but that can be worked around by saying there is an extra step 
needed. Either downloading a binary or using a platform dependent way of 
building that mini-bash. (Most users will probably download it.)