I recently worked a lot on getting my local Windows box to compile Windows.
I got a lot of help from the below link that took me a few steps towards the
solution.
http://www.chriscalender.com/resolving-the-bison-exe-m4-invalid-argument-error-when-building-mysqlmariadbxtradb-on-windows/

I had to save away my bison installation, uninstall it and then also
go into a registry editor and remove the various links to the Start Menu referring to
some help for Bison that had spaces in the registry. Resolving this meant that I could
manually run bison on the files in the mysql tarball and get the desired result. But it
was still not enough, I still had the same error when running a full automatic compile.

So then I found the …

If you’ve tried compiling MySQL/MariaDB/XtraDB from source code on Windows, you may have run into the following error:

C:\GnuWin32\bin\bison.exe: m4: Invalid argument

Now, it is a known bug to receive this error if you install it to a location with spaces in the path. So don’t do that!

But, there are cases when you have not installed it to a path with spaces, and you still receive this error.

I’ve encountered it a number of times, and I’m not the only one (btw, thanks Venu for your existing work-around up to this point!).

…

Problem:

Compile MySQL/MariaDB/XtraDB on Windows and receive the following error …

Not counting obtaining the source code, and once you have the prerequisites satisfied, [Windows] users can build from source code in 5 easy steps.

Prerequisites – Install & ensure they are in the $PATH:

1. CMake <-- Download
2. C++ compiler <-- Visual Studio 2008 Express - Free Download
3. Bison <-- Download (ensure m4.exe is also included, which it should be)

Optional (but most likely you’ll want):

1. Perl <-- For Test Suite/Scripts. Strawberry Perl is a great option.
2. Bazaar <-- If want latest …