Date: Mon, 21 Feb 1994 13:37:48 +0100
From: terra AT diku DOT dk
To: djgpp AT sun DOT soe DOT clarkson DOT edu
Subject: On the passing of long parameter lines (and make utilities)


Hi!

A lot of the recent postings have said something in the way of "since
djgpp supports almost any known method for passing long parameter lines,
why bother to put code in Gnu Make 3.70 (real mode version) to pass
the parameter list in one of a zillion ways?"

The reason why I did that (and this reason is still valid) is that not all
programs have been compiled with djgpp.  It is true, however, that
djgpp-compiled programs pose no problems.

Unfortunatly, programs compiled with MicroSoft C use another method,
"_argc", and the gnu utilites are among those.  I programmed Gnu Make to
*automatically* detect such programs and djgpp-program (in a dirty way, I
admit) and to use a suitable method for parameter passing.

The old Gnu Make for dos, version 3.58, had a LONGARGS environment variable
for passing parameters in "_argc" style, but it was at the very least
partially broken: the programs should be listed in LONGARGS separated by
colons, so the drive could not be included.  This would be no real problem
if only the base name, "prog.exe", was matched against this, but sometimes
the complete path "c:\xyz\prog.exe" was used and matching of course fails.
Useless.

I hope this clears up things and ends the debate.  Future versions of Gnu
Make may combine efforts and compile either under djgpp, Turbo C, or
whatever.

Morten Welinder
terra AT diku DOT dk