Re: VMS progname and exit handling - Take 4

[h.becker]

On 03/31/2014 06:46 AM, John E. Malmberg wrote:
> This has the makefile changes needed to build from master and on VAX/VMS.
> 
> In addition, vms_progname.c that is compatible as a VMS specific
> replacement for the progname.c that is used for several GNU projects.
> 
> This variant of vms_progname.c has an additional feature that it
> temporarily creates a foreign command that make uses for a macro to
> represent the command that invoked make.  This foreign command has no
> embedded spaces or dollar sign characters which could cause unexpected
> results if further string processing is done.
> 
> The vms_exit() is similar to the /DEFINE=_POSIX_EXIT, except that it
> allows pass-through of VMS exit statuses of 8 or higher, and allows
> setting the SEVERITY and message inhibit settings for the encoded Posix
> status.  The message inhibit bits prevents the DCL shell from
> re-displaying status messages that have already been displayed.
> 
> Additional work needs to be done to convert POSIX encoded child exit
> statuses back to the original Unix status internally.  This is usually
> handled by the /DEFINE=_POSIX_EXIT.
> 
> We are not simply using the /DEFINE=_POSIX_EXIT as it does not support
> mixing the VMS exit codes and Unix exit codes, along with setting
> special VMS status bits.

It seems I need more than this patch to compile a test version. It seems
this needs to be applied on top of a previous patch, or?

Again, this looks like a lot of code to set the program name and to
handle the exit code. And I'm still not convinced that defining a DCL
symbol and deleting it at image exit is the right thing to do. As far as
I can see, it can be simpler than that.