Date: Fri, 13 Jan 1995 10:36:52 +0900
From: Stephen Turnbull <turnbull AT shako DOT sk DOT tsukuba DOT ac DOT jp>
To: UCKO AT VAX1 DOT ROCKHURST DOT EDU
Cc: djgpp AT sun DOT soe DOT clarkson DOT edu
Subject: Changing system() [was: bug in djgpp's make]

Aaron--

   >If I wasn't afraid to be lynched, I would be almost tempted to say Make
   >should *always* call COMMAND.COM, even if the user said otherwise,
   >because this at least would assure portability.  As it stands, I think

   Why not just hold Makefile authors responsibile for guaranteeing

That's current policy ;-)  It's more broken than SHELL= ;-) ;-)

   portability?  You could simplify this by adding an option telling make
   to run command.com; perhaps this option could also, if at all feasible,
   generate a list of external programs called (so the author could see
   if there were any nonstandard utils listed).

If you mean which programs system() knows about, that belongs in docs,
not in the executable.  If you mean which programs system() does *not*
know about, there is the GCC option (just for fun call it
--list-actions, I don't have make docs online, not in English) which
simply lists the proposed actions to stdout.  Try 

		 "make --list-actions | sort | uniq"

Oh, are those non-standard utilities?  Sorry....  Which is
nonstandard:  make?  sort?  uniq?
    Make is standard with DJGPP.
    Sort comes with DOS, also there are the Backus ports.
    Uniq is in the Backus ports.
    So this is an unnecessary feature.
    Reuse! Reuse!! Reuse!!! (sorry, just read a book by Yourdon:  The
Decline and Fall of the American Programmer).
    --Steve