I tried to carry out a fresh build / install of KDE for windows using the emerge system. Whilst emerging 'qt' a number of errors were thrown up. Looking at the output in the console I noticed a lot of references to VS98, which threw up a few red flags seeing as I was trying to build using mingw! Looking at the PATH environmental variable I noticed that VS6 (used for old work projects) had added a few entries of it's own. Removing these and rerunning 'emerge qt' got me further but more errors started cropping up. I bit more digging revealed that VS6 had also added some entries to the INCLUDE and LIB environmental variables. Removing these and rerunning 'emerge qt' again finally allowed the build to complete successfully. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Install VS6 2. Follow: https://techbase.kde.org/Getting_Started/Build/Windows/emerge 3. At the 'emerge qt' step errors should start to get thrown up Actual Results: Lots of script / compiler errors Expected Results: QT should have compiled successfully Not a huge issue, not too many people still have VS6 installed. Could possibly be tested for and prevented though.
VC98 is unsupported and doesn't have the necessary features, see supported compilers in the kde settings-example.bat file.
After re-reading: the same applies to anything that interferes with include / lib / bin search path, but I don't think we should remove these in emerge. E.g.: having mingw already in path will mess up a vc build too.