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<p class="MsoNormal">Friends<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">My Windows build (new laptop) got stuck again, but this time I managed to work out what is going on. This email is just to record the issue; I’ll add something to the wiki.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b>tl;dr:</b> a MSYS build will fail in a deeply strange way if your MSYS bin directory doesn’t take priority over the windows/system32 director.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b>Symptom</b>: “sh libtool” hangs indefinitely. The process manager shows an extant “cmd” and “sed”, but nothing else. libtool is a shell script that comes from a tarball, and is unpacked into libraries/integer-gmp/gmp/gmpbuild/libtool<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b>Cause</b>: libtool invokes the following command line (in the function func_convert_coer_msys_to_w32:<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:"Courier New""> cmd /c “echo blah”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">and pipes the result to sed. <i>But MSYS mangles the command line to turn slashes into backslashes.</i> So the actual command line is more like<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:"Courier New""> cmd \c “echo blah”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">which does something entirely different, and indeed hangs waiting for input on stdin.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b>Solution</b>: So how did this ever work on any MSYS installation? Because
<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraph" style="text-indent:-18.0pt;mso-list:l0 level1 lfo1"><![if !supportLists]><span style="font-family:Symbol"><span style="mso-list:Ignore">·<span style="font:7.0pt "Times New Roman"">
</span></span></span><![endif]>msys/1.0/bin has a little script “cmd” which hands off to the real c:/windows/system32/cmd<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraph" style="text-indent:-18.0pt;mso-list:l0 level1 lfo1"><![if !supportLists]><span style="font-family:Symbol"><span style="mso-list:Ignore">·<span style="font:7.0pt "Times New Roman"">
</span></span></span><![endif]>MSYS does not mangle the command-line for programs in msys/1.0/bin<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraph" style="text-indent:-18.0pt;mso-list:l0 level1 lfo1"><![if !supportLists]><span style="font-family:Symbol"><span style="mso-list:Ignore">·<span style="font:7.0pt "Times New Roman"">
</span></span></span><![endif]><i>On my old laptop, msys/1.0/bin was in my path before c:/windows/system32</i>. So plain “cmd” gets the script, and MSYS does not mangle the command line. The script passes arguments on unchanged to the real cmd.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraph" style="text-indent:-18.0pt;mso-list:l0 level1 lfo1"><![if !supportLists]><span style="font-family:Symbol"><span style="mso-list:Ignore">·<span style="font:7.0pt "Times New Roman"">
</span></span></span><![endif]>NB: c:/windows/system32 is in the “system” path, which precedes the “user” path. So no amount of fiddling with the “user” path will fix this. There are two solutions:<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraph" style="margin-left:72.0pt;text-indent:-18.0pt;mso-list:l0 level2 lfo1">
<![if !supportLists]><span style="font-family:"Courier New""><span style="mso-list:Ignore">o<span style="font:7.0pt "Times New Roman"">
</span></span></span><![endif]>Modify the system path<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoListParagraph" style="margin-left:72.0pt;text-indent:-18.0pt;mso-list:l0 level2 lfo1">
<![if !supportLists]><span style="font-family:"Courier New""><span style="mso-list:Ignore">o<span style="font:7.0pt "Times New Roman"">
</span></span></span><![endif]>Use a .bashrc file to prepend the stuff you need<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">This is pretty subtle stuff. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Simon
<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0cm;margin-bottom:.0001pt"><i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:8.0pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif";mso-fareast-language:EN-GB">Microsoft Research Limited (company number 03369488) is registered in England and Wales
<o:p></o:p></span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0cm;margin-bottom:.0001pt"><i><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size:8.0pt;font-family:"Arial","sans-serif";mso-fareast-language:EN-GB">Registered office is at 21 Station Road, Cambridge, CB1 2FB</span></i><span style="mso-fareast-language:EN-GB"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
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