If the build system was created for Cygwin, it might not work in other environments without modifications (The make language is the same, but escaping, path conversion are working differently, $(realpath) fails on Windows paths, DOS bat files are started as shell scripts and many similar issues). Note that you might not be able to select your environment. Use mingw32-make.exe from the package, that's more up to date. MinGW abandoned? There was usually MSYS 1.19 bundled with MinGW packages, that contained an old make.exe.Good quality, package manager (pacman), all tooling available. MSYS2 ( ) Works well, second fastest solution after ezwinports.Worked well but featured very old make (3.86 or so) It's possible to use make from ezwinports and bash from Cygwin or MSYS2 as a workaround. There is no bash provided with it, that can be a problem for some build systems. No bash provided, but it's possible to use it from other packages. GNUWin ( ) It was good and fast but now abandoned.

Has some difficulties with Windows paths and it's slow.

Cygwin ( ) Probably the most popular one and the most compatible with POSIX.You can get everything with the popular POSIX emulators for Windows: The build system might require bash features, if for nothing else, it's popular to create temp file names from the process ID ($$$$). Touch, rm, cp, sed, test, tee, echo and the like. The chances are that besides GNU make, you'll also need many of the coreutils.

Reddit makefile for windows 7