[comp.sys.ibm.pc.misc] Microsoft Make in MS-C 6.0 Package

frank@odetics.com (Frank Merrow) (02/06/91)

Hi Netters,

I have been toying with updating my MS-C from 5.1 to 6.0, but can not really
seem to find a good reason to spend the money.  The only thing I see 
that even MIGHT be worth the money is the supposedly new and improved
"make" utility.  I was hoping one of you 6.0 literate out there might
give me some information on this puppy.  Is it for instance Unix
compatable?  Does it support pattern recognition rules (i.e. "%" rules)?
How does it compare to say dmake?  (dmake interest me because it looks
like it might work well with my MKS Toolkit.)

Any information would be greatly appreciated.

Frank

phil@eos.arc.nasa.gov (Phil Stone) (02/07/91)

In article <1991Feb6.073307.13500@odetics.com> frank@odetics.com (Frank Merrow) writes:
>I have been toying with updating my MS-C from 5.1 to 6.0, but can not really
>seem to find a good reason to spend the money.  The only thing I see 
>that even MIGHT be worth the money is the supposedly new and improved
>"make" utility.  I was hoping one of you 6.0 literate out there might
>give me some information on this puppy.  Is it for instance Unix
>compatable?  Does it support pattern recognition rules (i.e. "%" rules)?
>How does it compare to say dmake?  (dmake interest me because it looks
>like it might work well with my MKS Toolkit.)
>
>Any information would be greatly appreciated.
>
>Frank

'nmake' as it is called, is a very complete make utility much on par
with Unix "make," and nearly, but not 100%, compatible, from what I
have found (I can't answer your pattern-recognition question
specifically, though, sorry).

My big problem with nmake is that is is HUGE.  I think the old make
was around 30K or so.  Well, nmake is up in the range of 70K.  I'm
relatively new to the DOS world, so maybe I haven't set things up
optimally, but since I run under MKS, there isn't enough room to
invoke nmake directly and have it run compilers, linkers etc., even
on quite small source modules!  I have had to resort to the '-n'
option piped into a batch file, and then run the batch file.  This
is annoying, to say the least.

So, I'm answering your question with questions of my own.  Does
everything (MKS, nmake, whatever nmake invokes) have to live in
the same 640K?  Can't anything use expansion memory?  Is anybody
else running into this problem, or is there an easy fix that I've
overlooked?  I'd prefer not to resort to OS/2 or Windows just to
fix this one problem.


		Phil Stone (phil@eos.arc.nasa.gov | ...ames!eos!phil)