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From: Juan Manuel Guerrero <juan DOT guerrero AT gmx DOT de>
To: djgpp-workers AT delorie DOT com
Subject: Harmonizing error message produced by djgpp with those produced by gnu/linux
Date: Sun, 20 Sep 2009 05:03:15 +0200
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Reply-To: djgpp-workers AT delorie DOT com

The testsuite of Make shows again a difficulty that appeares with a lot of GNU
programs that are tried to be ported using DJGPP.  The programs started by the
testsuite may produce error messages like this "No such file or directory" but
the DJGPP port produces an error message like "No such file or directory (ENOENT)".
Every time the produced output is compared with some reference output, the
testsuite decides that the test has failed because the strings compared do not
match.  In this case the reason for not matching is the (ENOENT) string
produced by the DJGPP port of the program used.

Inspecting the cvs repository I was not able to figure out why the DJGPP error
message strings have been designed this way.  Probably they should be compatible
to some old DOS compiler, but I do not know.

Due to the repeating difficulties that the current version of these strings cause
the question arises if they couldn't be changend to the same wording than gnu/linux
uses?  In almost every case it should be enough to remove the string in parentesis,
e.g.: (ENOENT).

It should be possible to define some environment variable that will allow to
switch at run time between both versions of the error messages if really a
backward compatibility is wanted.