> From: Bruno Haible <br...@clisp.org> > Cc: Gavin Smith <gavinsmith0...@gmail.com>, pertu...@free.fr, > bug-texinfo@gnu.org > Date: Sun, 27 Oct 2024 19:31:12 +0100 > > Eli Zaretskii wrote: > > MinGW programs are stand-alone native Windows executables. But the > > MinGW development environment includes MSYS Bash and MSYS ports of > > various GNU utilities, ... > > It is *one* of the possible development environment for mingw. [1]
Not the "official" way, though. MSYS was developed (as a fork of Cygwin) because Cygwin fell short of allowing to run Posix scripts seamlessly when building and testing MinGW ports. > > Cygwin comes with its own versions of Bash and the associated > > utilities, but they do not cater to MinGW programs by making, behind > > the scenes, the few adaptations that allow running native Windows > > programs from a Posix environment. As a simple example, > > colon-separated PATH gets converted to semi-colon separated when MSYS > > Bash invokes a MinGW program > > Cygwin does a similar thing; not inside bash but inside its fork+exec() > system calls (which bash uses, of course). [4] Not entirely, because, for example, /dev/null is left unchanged. Also, drive letters are not handled, AFAIR, so invoking programs from another drive could be problematic. > Without that, like you say, no MinGW program could > ever find executables and shared libraries by searching PATH. If the executables and shared libraries are in the current directory, you don't need PATH.
