RE: Path separator character

[Darcy L. Watkins]

Hello,

> I am building 8088 and 8086 
> embedded firmware so our tools are very specialized. In the 
> future, we may use Linux as the OS in our embedded systems.

I am using CYGWIN under Win2k for embedded 80188 firmware development.
First I attempted to build GNU make for DOS/Windows using VC++ 7 (aka .NET)
and after fixing a makefile got it to link ok.  It appeared to work ok, but
I ran into problems with the old 16 bit DPMI scheme used by BC++ 3.1.  I was
able to workaround this in the CYGWIN environment.

> My primary objective for this project was to get the best 
> make for our development. I was told that Microsoft nmake and 
> opus make were good choices. I decided to test GNU make. The 
> advantages over nmake and opus are that (1) it can be used 
> across platforms standardizing the makefile syntax, and (2) 
> it can be modified if needed. 

I went with GNU make because I wanted to put a suite of tools together for
16bit embedded x86 development that was entirely free so it would be useful
for educational purposes, hobby and grass roots embedded development.  I am
even toying with the idea of writing a book on the subject.  I considered
NMAKE and Borland's make available in their free command line C++ compiler
package, but wanted one that was widely available, used contemporary syntax,
etc.

> So, the questions:
> 1) Is GNU make the best choice? Sell me.

I don't really know.  I wasn't able to get << redirection to work using
either a CMD.EXE shell or BASH under CYGWIN.  With the command line
restriction in the DOS/Win world, this is a must have.  On the other hand, I
found that under either CMD.EXE or BASH, the builtin ECHO command can accept
long macro expansions and pipe it to a file.  This is a bit clumsy because
you have to escape special characters (e.g. double the backslashes, etc).

> 2) Is there a better port than this? I want a native Win32 
> binary, no cygwin or mingw32 dlls. If this port was not 
> really designed for my use, then a patch to the source would 
> not be useful as others would have no need of it. 

I would be interested in a native WIN32 / DOS port with full implementation
of << redirection.

On the other hand, I am enjoying having the UNIX suite of commands and shell
capabilities of BASH under Win2k.  My next step is to get back into using
PERL for handy dandy utility scripts.

I would also be interested in hearing what you are doing with embedded 8086
and 8088.  There appears to be very few of us working in that world these
days.  Everyone has abandoned 16bit x86, I think because of the segmented
memory models involved.  (Please reply to this off list as it isn't
GNUMakeWin32 related).



Regards,

Darcy

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Darcy L. Watkins
address@hidden
http://www.xstreamworship.com
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