Yes, you want to put depot_tools ahead of everything else, otherwise gcl will refer to the GNU Common Lisp compiler.
You may want to add this to your .bashrc file or your shell's equivalent so that you don’t need to reset your $PATH manually each time you open a new shell.
Installing on Windows
Preamble
Chromium is mostly designed to be run using the native Windows tools and the
Msys (Git for Windows) toolchain. Cygwin is not recommended, and likely things will fail in cryptic ways.
Do not use drag-n-drop or copy-n-paste extract from Explorer, this will not extract the hidden ".git" folder which is necessary for depot_tools to autoupdate itself. You can use "Extract all..." from the context menu though.
Do not extract to a path containing spaces. If you do, gclient will produce the error "update_depot_tools.bat was not expected at this time" or similar.
Add depot_tools to thestart (not end!) of your PATH:
With Administrator access:
Control Panel > System and Security > System > Advanced system settings
Modify the PATH system variable to include depot_tools
Without Administrator access:
Control Panel > User Accounts > User Accounts > Change my environment variables
Add a PATH user variable: C:\path\to\depot_tools;%PATH%
Run gclientfrom the cmd shell. The first time it is run, it will install its own copy of various tools. If you run gclient from a non-cmd shell, it may appear to run properly, but python, and other tools may not get installed correctly (while it should work fine from a msys bash shell, you may still trip over bugs from time to time).
If you see strange errors with the file system on the first run of gclient, you may want to disable Windows Indexing.
If it complains that it can't find python, make sure you don't already have a .gclient file in the same directory.
After running gclient open a command prompt and type where python and confirm that the depot_tools python.bat comes ahead of any copies of python.exe. Failing to ensure this can lead to overbuilding when using gn - see crbug.com/611087