Date: Thu, 12 Jan 1995 11:38:15 +0900
From: Stephen Turnbull <turnbull AT shako DOT sk DOT tsukuba DOT ac DOT jp>
To: babcock AT cfa DOT harvard DOT edu
Cc: djgpp AT sun DOT soe DOT clarkson DOT edu
Subject: Changing system() [was: bug in djgpp's make]

I'm wondering about the impact on people who use features of shells
besides redirection in their makefiles.  OK, GO32 does its own
globbing, etc.  But how about about aliases, which people who use 4DOS
or ms_sh may use?  I do.  And so on.

   From: peprbv AT cfa0 DOT harvard DOT edu (Bob Babcock)

   > Neither bug nor gotcha.  Every reasonable make program calls
   > compilers directly, not through COMMAND.COM (with spawnXXX()
   > function call), precisely because this is the only way to get
   > at its exit status.

   Actually, it is possible to get the exit status from a program run
   under COMMAND.COM in a reasonably portable way: create a .BAT file
   to run the program, check the error level in the .BAT file and
   signal success/failure through an environment variable or auxiliary
   file.  OPUS make actually does this automatically when it needs to
   go through command.com.

This looks like a better solution to me.  If system() checks that
variable itself, then returns the value, this should be compatible
with everyone's wants.  No?
    I'm suddenly realizing that I'm not entirely sure what should be
done by make and what make is expected to turn over to the shell.  But
I would hope that most things will be handled in a way compatible with
the user's shell-of-choice.
    --Steve <turnbull AT shako DOT sk DOT tsukuba DOT ac DOT jp>