csh and/or GNU make bug

[Volker Quetschke]

Hi!

Paul D. Smith wrote:
> %% gustav <gustav@indiana.edu> writes:
> 
>   g> There is a bug either in GNU make or in tcsh or in both---on
>   g> Cygwin. The combination of csh and GNU make will hang if SHELL is
>   g> declared as /bin/csh -f.
> 
> I don't know what is causing this particular issue.

First a question: Can you really reproduce this problem?

I'm asking because some people have peported hangs while building
OpenOffice.org (cygwin's tcsh is used as part of the build environment).
and if you remove the -f this "cures" or reduces the number of hangs.

tcsh is used as the shell used by the make utility (dmake) that is used.

Un-? Fortunately only a few people are able to reproduce this hang. If this
really hangs reproducible for you (works fine here) this might be a start to
locate the problem

> However, I have to strongly recommend that no one should use csh, in any
> form, as the value for SHELL in a makefile.
> 
> There are too many odd things about the way csh works that makes it
> inappropriate for use with make.  Primarily the issues involve quoting
> and multi-line scripting, but there are more subtle issues as well: for
> example the jobserver feature (not available on the Windows port--yet)
> does not work with csh, because csh has an annoying habit of closing
> open file descriptors when it starts up.
I don't see any argument against tcsh if it does what it's supposed to do
as part of the make process. Evaluate the command line and eventually start
a programs for the make tool.

  Volker

> Really, csh is just broken--and for makefiles even moreso.
> 
> My HO, of course :-).
> 

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