Re: Useful patch for GNUmake on Windows

[Eli Zaretskii]

On Thu, 19 Sep 2002, Earnie Boyd wrote:

> > the DJGPP port does not
> > automatically honor SHELL set in the Makefile, and it does import SHELL
> > from the parent environment.
> 
> I'll have to think about that.  What kinds of issues were caused by
> this?

Mainly, two considerations:

  - Unlike on Unix, SHELL is normally not set on DOS/Windows systems.  So 
    if someone does set them, it's a good sign that she actually wants 
    that shell to be used everywhere, not only in interactive sessions.

  - Many Unix-born Makefile's say "SHELL = /bin/sh" (in particular, this 
    is required by GNU coding standards), but most DOS/Windows machines 
    don't have a /bin directory on every disk, and many don't even have a 
    Unix-compliant sh.exe installed anywhere.

The first consideration suggests that SHELL's value from the environment, 
if set, should be used, the second consideration suggests that if the 
shell named by a Makefile cannot be found on the system, either in the 
named /bin directory or along PATH, SHELL's setting should be ignored and 
the default one, taken from COMSPEC, should be used instead.

More about this can be found in the file README.DOS in the Make 
distribution.