Re: make 3.82 for Win32 differs from documentation ?

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Paul Smith <address@hidden>
> Date: Thu, 26 May 2011 11:00:14 -0400
> Cc: address@hidden
> Reply-To: address@hidden
> 
> > 3. SHELL is readonly, SHELLFLAGS not  work
> 
> I don't know why this would be so, but someone familiar with the Windows
> port will need to comment.

"SHELL is readonly" is inaccurate, although from the user's
perspective it may look as if it were.  The truth is that (a) Make
determines internally which SHELL to use out of those available on the
host, and (b) supports only two values that a Makefile can set: either
a Posix sh.exe (or similar) or the native Windows cmd.exe.  Setting
SHELL to any other value will simply not work as the user would
expect.

The reason is that no one contributed code to support an arbitrary
value of SHELL without breaking the tricksy games Make on Windows
plays when it runs external commands.  The code currently assumes that
SHELL points to either a Posixy shell or to cmd.exe.