Re: [Mingw-users] dumb newbie question

[Eli Z. <el...@gn...>]

> Date: Mon, 17 Jul 2017 09:16:31 -0400
> From: Earnie via MinGW-users <min...@li...>
> Cc: Earnie <ea...@us...>
> 
> >> This is OT here, but I won't recommend using the MSYS shell together
> >> with a native Windows build of Emacs, as they have subtle
> >> incompatibilities, e.g. regarding file names.
> > 
> > Oh aye I know all about that but since you raised the issue what would
> > you use to do editing while using MSYS?  Vim?  Pico?  Nano?
> > 
> 
> The only issue here is that of a path POSIX versus WINDOWS.  If you
> don't create files that contain POSIX paths that are then executed by
> your native Emacs you should be fine.

That's not the only issue.  Another one is that Emacs supports
standard Windows shells and the Cygwin Bash, but it doesn't support
the MSYS Bash, so it might become confused when invoking shell
commands, and fail to tweak the command-line arguments quoting
properly.

A variant of that is when you invoke an MSYS Sed, say, with an editing
command that starts with a slash -- MSYS might decide that it's a file
name, and convert it to a backslash form, which will, of course, cause
weird error messages.

Another potential gotcha is with invoking async subprocesses from
Emacs: if the program they run is an MSYS program, it could have its
own peculiar ideas, not shared by Emacs, whether its stdin is a
console or not.

The value of PATH is another potential issue: the value known to Emacs
will almost certainly different from the one known to MSYS Bash, so
invoking shell commands might mysteriously fail, although Emacs did
find the command along its PATH.

And there may be some others.

Kids, don't try this at home!