Re: MinGw port of gawkextlib

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Cc: aschorr@telemetry-investments.com, bug-gawk@gnu.org
> From: Manuel Collado <mcollado2011@gmail.com>
> Date: Wed, 11 May 2022 17:45:48 +0200
> 
> MSYS has automake versions up to 1.11. Gawkextlib distribution tarballs 
> have been generated with automake 1.16.
> 
> >
> >> (1) On a Unix/Linux environment:
> >> - Compile, link, test and generate a new source tarball, without install:
> >>       WANT_AUTOMAKE=1.11 autoreconf -i && \
> >>       ./configure --with-gawk=... --with-gawkextlib=... --prefix=... && \
> >>       make && make check && make dist
> >
> > Alternatively, you could download the latest Automake, and build and
> > install it on your Windows system.  I have Automake 1.16.1 and
> > Autoconf 2.69, both of which I think I built myself some time ago.
> 
> Of course. But this implies that the Mingw+Msys distribution alone is 
> not enough to build gawkextlib.

"The Mingw+Msys distribution" is not well defined.  Sometimes one must
have tools beyond the basic installation, and sometimes one has to
upgrade parts of the distribution where the official distribution
didn't keep up.

IMO, it is fair play for a package such as gawkextlib to assume a
fully-functional development environment.  This means if many projects
require some minimal version of Autotools, one has to follow suit and
upgrade one's tools as much as reasonably possible, to keep one's
development environment functional.  AFAIR, I installed these newer
versions on my development system precisely because enough packages
rejected the old ones, and the installation was very easy and didn't
present any problems.  My recommendation is that you do the same.  It
is certainly easier than splitting the build into two steps, one of
which is a cross-build.