Re: Bug report: Compile with Microsoft and Intel compiler

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Thu, 28 Apr 2005 23:21:54 +0000
> From: "Earnie Boyd" <address@hidden>
> 
> > For the MS compiler maybe.  But that's not the model that GNU autoconf
> > uses.  They don't test for platforms, they test for individual
> > features.  In the UNIX world it's quite possible to have a system
> > where getenv() is there, but not strerror(), etc. so a single #define
> > for "STDLIB" is not expressive enough.
> >
> 
> Which is why I created MSYS.  MSYS provides a minimal system to execute
> configure for a native target.

Being able to run configure scripts on a non-Posix platform does not
mean we should use this in building a basic tool such as Make.  Make
is one of the first few tools one needs to bootstrap a GNU development
environment on Windows, so it makes sense to try to do that with a
minimal set of tools, relying on the underlying OS and its native
tools as much as we can.

As an example, the DJGPP build of Make doesn't use anything besides
what's found on a typical DOS platform (and the basic development
tools that allow to compile C programs), although there's a Bash port
that can run configure scripts (and does that in almost every other
DJGPP port of a GNU package).