Re: Useful patch for GNUmake on Windows

[Earnie Boyd]

Greg Chicares wrote:
> 
> Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> >
> > On Thu, 19 Sep 2002, Earnie Boyd wrote:
> >
> > > > the DJGPP port does not
> > > > automatically honor SHELL set in the Makefile, and it does import SHELL
> > > > from the parent environment.
> > >
> > > I'll have to think about that.  What kinds of issues were caused by
> > > this?
> >
> > Mainly, two considerations:
> >
> >   - Unlike on Unix, SHELL is normally not set on DOS/Windows systems.  So
> >     if someone does set them, it's a good sign that she actually wants
> >     that shell to be used everywhere, not only in interactive sessions.
> >
> >   - Many Unix-born Makefile's say "SHELL = /bin/sh" (in particular, this
> >     is required by GNU coding standards), but most DOS/Windows machines
> >     don't have a /bin directory on every disk, and many don't even have a
> >     Unix-compliant sh.exe installed anywhere.
> 
> With MSYS,
>   $ set |grep -iw shell
>   SHELL=/bin/sh
>   $ ls /bin/sh
>   /bin/sh
> so I'd think MSYS should follow the *nix behavior.
> 

The msys-1.0.dll dependent version I agree.  We're discussing though the
mingw32-make or Win32 native make port.

> The make manual could be revised to say that, but
> it's not trivial to cover all cases--my cygwin
> installation (perhaps a bit dated) says
>   $ set | grep -iw shell
>   SHELL=/bin/bash
>   _=shell
>   $ ls /bin/sh
>   c:\cygwin\bin\ls.exe: /bin/sh: No such file or directory
>   $ ls /bin/bash
>   c:\cygwin\bin\ls.exe: /bin/bash: No such file or directory
> 
> But if the manual's only changed to say in essence
> "here's the default dos/windows behavior, that's
> what djgpp uses, MSYS follows the *nix behavior,
> and other 'environments' may do something else",
> is that an improvement? Is this behavior determined
> at build time, at run time, or a little of both?
> (Yeah, I could read the source, but I'm way
> behind on a GPL project I'm getting paid for.)
> 
> The manual is important. I've read it more times
> than Lord of the Rings, and that's saying something.
> I can write up a patch for it, but need to ask
> for this guidance first.
> 

I'll let Paul or Eli make a determination on changes to the
documentation.  It would probably be better to have a separate section
for Port Variants as an appendix and allow modifications to the Port
Variants based on the porting author input.

Earnie.