Re: Schedule for GNU make 3.81

[Andreas M. Kirchwitz]

Hello Paul!

 >     http://make.paulandlesley.org/make-3.81beta2.tar.bz2
 >     http://make.paulandlesley.org/make-3.81beta2.tar.gz
 > 
 > This release contains all current bug fixes and new features.

Thanks for this new version and all the effort you put
into this software.

You may remember my problem with make (3.80, 3.81beta1) on
Solaris 10 which I have reported on Dec 5th, 2004. On a simple
Makefile like this it dumps core:

        fubar:
                /bin/echo hello

I've tested this on Solaris 10 3/05 (official release)
on various SPARC, Intel and AMD systems.

Solaris 10 doesn't seem to be very popular, but since
/usr/sfw/bin/gmake (version 3.80) on Solaris shows the
same behaviour, I couldn't believe that Sun ships a
non-working gmake, and so I did further investigation.

Now, I've found out that the environment variable "LC_CTYPE"
seems to have a big influence.

If LC_CTYPE is unset or set to "C" or "POSIX",
it works perfectly fine.

But if LC_CTYPE is set to "iso_8859_1", then make crashes.

        LC_CTYPE=iso_8859_1 /usr/local/src/make-3.81beta2/make
        Abort - core dumped

This can be reproduced on a freshly installed Solaris 10 3/05
logged in as root without any special environment or startup
files.

Of course, this might not be a bug in "make" itself but in some
Solaris library, but I use Solaris 10 a lot and didn't notice
such behaviour for any other program.

I don't know if setting LC_CTYPE is still necessary nowadays.
I have this in my environment since years to get working 8-bit
characters (like German umlauts). It might not be necessary any
longer, and at first sight I couldn't see any difference any
longer.

However, software shouldn't dump core just because of a valid
environment variable. ;-)

If you don't have access to a Solaris 10 system and want me
anything to do, please let me know. I'd be happy to help.

        Greetings, Andreas