Re: How to *properly* set up Emacs on Windows?

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Joost Kremers <joostkremers@fastmail.fm>
> Date: Thu, 10 Feb 2022 22:58:42 +0100
> 
> 
> >> (The
> >> Windows binaries that were anounced on emacs-devel the other day
> >> appear to be MSYS2 binaries?
> >
> > I don't think so.
> 
> I think I saw it mentioned somewhere that they were built with MSYS2. But I
> understand now that it's possible to build MinGW binaries with MSYS2, so that
> doesn't mean anything.

MSYS was originally developed to allow building MinGW programs using
Posix configury (Autoconf, Automake, a Posix shell, etc.).  So almost
every MinGW program that is a port from GNU or Unix is built using
MSYS.  But they are still MinGW (a.k.a. "native Windows") programs,
because they use MinGW GCC, MinGW Binutils, and MinGW header files and
libraries to compile and link the programs.  By contrast, building an
MSYS program requires to use MSYS GCC, header files and libraries, and
the produced executables and DLLs depend on MSYS DLL.

People use MSYS for purposes other than building MinGW programs,
because they want a Posix interactive environment, but I think that's
a mistake, because MSYS wasn't meant to serve as such an environment.
If one wants a Posix environment on Windows, one should install
Cygwin, IMO (and then use a Cygwin build of Emacs).