Re: make'ing make-3.18beta4 under mingw/msys - "undefined referenceto `sleep'"

[KJKHyperion]

Eli Zaretskii wrote:

> I revisited the patch posted there to allow -j without sh.exe, and I'm afraid I 
> don't understand the patch.
I wrote it quite a while ago... I hope I still remember it right

>  It does this:
>
>  . add "^()" to sh_chars_dos[] in job.c
>  . use '^' to escape special characters such as \ and " in job.c
>  . removes the code fragment in main.c that forces job_slots = 1 if sh.exe is 
> not available
>
> Can someone please explain which part(s) of this patch solve(s) the original 
> problem?
all of them, with the possible exclusion of the change to sh_chars_dos 
(IIRC that controls which strings need to be quoted, but I'm not 100% 
sure. If that's true, the change is correct and needed). Caret-escaping 
solves the actual problem, it's equivalent to backslash-escaping for 
sh.exe, and apparently the issue was that the DOS command.com wasn't 
able of any sort of escaping. The change to main.c enables parallel 
building with a cmd shell, rather than just with an UNIX shell, since 
the escaping issue is "solved"

> For that matter, what shell features are required to enable -j on Windows, and 
> why?
>  
caret-escaping. Why I'm not sure, I just remember -j causes temporary 
batch files to be generated and run, and to build the command lines in 
them required escaping