Re: GNU make 4.2.90 release candidate available

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Wed, 28 Aug 2019 13:50:18 +0300
> From: Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden>
> Cc: address@hidden
> 
> I'm not sure I should look into each and every failure, given that the
> test suit is clearly not meant to run on Windows.  Not unless you have
> some magic way of making all these problems go away with some setup...

OK, after going through all the tests and making changes that would
allow them to run correctly with native MS-Windows shell, I'm down to
"51 Tests in 19 Categories Failed".  Which is "good enough" for me.
The failures where all eyeballed, and the conclusion is that they are
due to non-portable assumptions that are too much work to fix.  The
worst offenders are:

  . the assumption that $$FOO gets expanded by the shell into the
    value of FOO;
  . too sophisticated games with quoting;
  . shell commands too complex to port easily, like this one from
    output-sync:

      while [ ! -f ../mksync.$_[0] ]; do :; done; $CMD_rmfile 
../mksync.$_[0].wait; $sleep_command 1

I think the test suite could be made much more portable by using Make
itself instead of the shell as a subordinate program.

Thanks.