MinGW errors while building coreutils (consistent errors on both Windows and Linux) -- cause?

Question

Having been unsuccessful in finding recent, standalone binaries of various Unix tools like xargs and whatnot (this version, while great, requires external DLLs), I've taken up the challenge of compiling them myself.

...It's painful.

Ultimately, though, I succeeded with sed and grep.
However, when I try to build coreutils with MinGW GCC, I always get this error at the end of ./configure:

checking whether it is possible to resort to fread on /etc/mnttab... no
configure: error: could not determine how to read list of mounted file systems

Interestingly, this happens both on my Windows machine's MSYS environment, and on Ubuntu's MinGW.

Granted, I could just remove the check from configure by hand and try to continue, but I'm sure something is going to break down the line, like it always has.

Does anyone know what causes this, and how to fix it?

Answer 1

Is it because MinGW provides no full POSIX or SunOS or LFH or FHS emulation.

Even MSYS's build of coreutils is incomplete:

Not all tools from Coreutils are shipped with MSYS by default.

The only Windows-based POSIX emulation officially supported by coreutils is Cygwin:

The hard work the Cygwin team has done to port GNU Project software to MS-Windows is greatly admired. However the GNU team generally uses GNU Operating Systems and do not have access to Cygwin systems or MS-Windows systems which means that most of us can't help you. It would be most appreciated if you would make your bug report directly to the Cygwin folks. They are the experts and best suited to handle your problem.

About error from configure:

checking whether it is possible to resort to fread on /etc/mnttab... no
configure: error: could not determine how to read list of mounted file 
                  systems

There is no real mount in MSYS (only a very specific one), so there is no list of mounted fs in default location (/etc/mnttab).