Date: Wed, 30 Oct 1996 11:19:20 +0100 (MET)
From: Robert Hoehne <robert DOT hoehne AT mathematik DOT tu-chemnitz DOT de>
To: DJGPP workers <djgpp-workers AT delorie DOT com>
Subject: Problems with make 3.75
Message-Id: <Pine.HPP.3.95.961030110537.13520D-100000@newton.mathematik.tu-chemnitz.de>
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Yesterday I have tried to build GDB 4.16 from the official
sources with the new make 3.75 and I found, that the user
will be unable to build it without changing the makefile
when using no special shell, that measn when the default
shell is $(COMSPEC)).

I found the reason for this and an other problem only after 
checking the sources for make. Eli, you have changed the
special chars for checking, when the shell is called, that
it is called when found special characters for 4(N)DOS. These
are at least '^' and '&' (maybe also some others). But this
disables the use of long command lines when calling some
programs with this characters without quoting them. And
to the problem with GDB (I think this is the same for the
binutils) one of the files (I don't know exactly) is compiled
with the defines for the targets which contain '&' and is longer
than 126 characters.

BTW: I found this (mis)feature at first, when I tried to call
sed with the not unusual script, which conatins a '^'.

I think we/you should tell the user about this or change the
makefiles for gdb and binutils or change the behaviour of
make.

Robert