kdb@chinet.chi.il.us (Karl Botts) (02/20/91)
I am about to give up on MKS Make; it just has too many bugs, and the bugs have gone unfixed for almost two years now; MKS does not seem to give a damn. I can make it work, running under the Korn shell, but other members of my development group who use COMMAND.COM and are not terribly comfortable with using Make in the first place are just having too many problems. The trouble is that I have just finished setting up a system to build several libraries and 70-odd executables from about 1000 source files and about 40 makefiles, and have spent a lot of time trying to train the other programmers (and especially my boss) to use it. It is this training that is the most fragile and has taken the most time and struggle. If it was just me I would simply switch to another existing Make such as Opus and fix up the makefiles, but if I switch to another existing DOS make it will differ considerably from MKS Make, and I will have to try and retrain the other programmers, and they will probably get disgusted and go back to using batch files, and we will be back to the chaos from which we started (and I can sort of understand the way they feel.) However something must be done because, at the moment, I am the only one who can build our release product from scratch; this is not a good situation for anybody, least of all me; I ain't got the time. Unfortunately, every DOS make has a different set of features for getting around the inadequacies of DOS -- the command line limit, the fact that you can't reliably run Make recursively due to running out of memory, the weird command line syntaxes expected by the DOS development tools, ad infinatum. I am about to the point of finding the most powerful DOS Make I can, with source code, and hacking in the features of MKS Make that I need to support the existing makefiles and programmer training. So my question is, what is the best DOS Make, with source, to start from? My inclination is Gnu Make, which I believe has already been ported to DOS (although outside the aegis of the FSF) as part of something called the "Gnu-ish DOS project". I currently use Gnu Make on my Unix box, and I am quite happy with it. Would this be a good choice? Where do I get the source? I looked on osu-cis to no avail; they have, of course, true Gnu make, but I would rather not struggle with the initial port to DOS if I can avoid it. Any help would be appreciated. And of course, if I actually do this, I will make it available to the net.