Re: mingw make problems

[Christopher Faylor]

On Fri, Aug 18, 2006 at 12:21:41AM +0300, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
>> Date: Thu, 17 Aug 2006 17:02:30 -0400
>> From: Bill Hoffman
>> 
>> At 04:48 PM 8/17/2006, Christopher Faylor wrote:
>> 
>> >I don't understand why MinGW's make should be using anything like /bin/sh.
>> >Shouldn't it be using cmd.exe or command.com?
>> >
>> It seems that if it finds sh.exe in the path it uses it.
>
>Yes.  This is by design (not mine, long before I started using the
>Windows port, let alone contributing to it).  I'm guessing that the
>reason was twofold: (1) relative stupidity of Windows shells of yore,
>and (2) lots of Makefile's out there which depend on a Unixy shell,
>but don't say "SHELL = /bin/sh" explicitly.
>
>Make 3.81 adds a feature whereby you can say "SHELL = cmd.exe" and
>have it use CMD even if sh.exe is on your PATH.  Previous versions of
>Make didn't allow even that.

This behavior was controlled under the old Cygwin make via a --win32
option (an option that RMS repeatedly asked me to change, FWIW).

So, it sounds like one solution to the problem might be to just use
SHELL=cmd.exe.

cgf