RE: [PATCH] Windows jobserver updates for GNU make 4.1

[Troy Runkel]

Interesting.  Sounds like a great update.  I look forward to taking a look at 
it.

So, if I were to personally re-implement our Windows jobserver patch on top of 
your changes and then submit a new patch, would you be able to accept the patch 
using my already existing copyright assignment?

Thanks!

--Troy Runkel

-----Original Message-----
From: Paul Smith [mailto:address@hidden 
Sent: Monday, March 07, 2016 5:11 PM
To: Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden>; Troy Runkel <address@hidden>
Cc: address@hidden
Subject: Re: [PATCH] Windows jobserver updates for GNU make 4.1

On Tue, 2016-03-01 at 18:55 +0200, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > From: Troy Runkel <address@hidden>
> > CC: "address@hidden" <address@hidden>
> > Date: Tue, 1 Mar 2016 12:21:38 +0000
> > 
> > The changes for this patch were created by another developer where
> I work.  I've forwarded your questions to him and included his answers 
> below.  Thanks!
> 
> Thanks.  But if changes were not written by you, how can we accept 
> them, without knowing the name of that person and verifying we have a 
> copyright assignment from him on file?  The changes are substantial 
> enough to require legal papers.

I don't know if this is good or bad (although I can guess :)), but I'm about to 
push changes (probably tonight) which extract all aspects of the jobserver 
feature into platform-specific files.  So, this patch will no longer apply at 
all... but hopefully the changes needed for this feature will be much simpler 
to implement (in any event, they should be cleaner to implement).

The main impetus for this is a change I want to make to the POSIX 
implementation to allow us to use pselect() where available, which will get rid 
of the SO_RESTART/SIGCHLD hack and increase reliability (looking at 
https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/index.php?46261 ).  I just couldn't face another 
round of ever-more #ifdef'd code.

The POSIX jobserver code is now in posixos.c and the Windows code is now in 
w32/w32os.c.  There is a single "os.h" header file that defines the interface 
both support.

I've also added stub functions to vmsfunctions.c.  I need to look at the 
AmigaOS support to see what needs to be done there.  OS2 is using mainly the 
same interface as POSIX, weirdly enough.  I did a bit of work to pull those 
changes into posixos.c.

I have built on Linux and will test on OSX.

I have built on Windows using both Visual Studio 14 (2015) and MinGW GCC 4.9.3, 
with the build_w32.bat file (which I have completely rewritten... hope that's 
OK).  I edited, but did not try to use, the vcproj file to add the new file.

I am not able to test on VMS, AmigaOS, OS2, or DOS.

I'm not sure what to do about the plethora of other ways we can build for 
Windows.  Do we still have any use for dosbuild.bat for example? 
 It seems to invoke gcc... does that mean it's superseded by the build_w32.bat 
support for GCC builds?

I assume we still support NMakefile?

It's a little frustrating how many different methods we have to support.  I 
wonder if we can somehow condense this... hmm.