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Postings from September 2003
[originally sent to perlbug@perl.org: user "perlspinr"]
[re-sent via stupid ISP's Webmail interface to p5p]
Greeting P5P / Perl5 Maintainers,
I read the P5P Mailing List via Gmane, but I am at a different account (and a
Windoze system, bleah) at this time, so I am filing this report "manually"
using Webmail from an ISP. We'll see how it turns out; I will do my best.
I've been going over the file that is crucial for people trying to build perl
on a Windows OS, namely "{source-kit-root}/win32/makefile.mk". That file is
supposed to be for the dmake tool to be able to compile Perl using mingw-gcc,
borland-bcc or msvc-cl.exe. In that file are many dmake conditional makefile
statements of the syntax:
.IF "$(CCTYPE)" == "BORLAND"
CC = bcc32
.IF "$(BCCOLD)" != "define"
LINK32 = ilink32
.ELSE
LINK32 = tlink32
.ENDIF
[...]
.ENDIF
There are some statements that may not be properly terminated; they have
paired with the .IF conditional, an ".END" (rather than ".ENDIF"). I do not
know if this is acceptable dmake syntax -- I do not even know where one can
find out what dmake syntax is. I hate dmake (see reasons below).
But IMO unless this is some deliberate variation in syntax intended to
accomplish a specific operation in the makefile.mk, I feel that these .END
lines are errata that ought to be corrected. Even if they parse as acceptable
conditional-block-terminators the inconsistency with the rest of the
makefile's syntax is not desirable from a maintainability standpoint.
As the attached patch shows, the entries I question are at lines 390, 394,
403.
BTW, the reason I am perusing that makefile.mk so carefully is that I am
going to create a GNU-make (the standard, freely available, maintained,
documented, cross-platform, full-featured 'make' utility) -compliant Makefile
to replace the 'dmake'-makefile.mk in the Perl distribution.
Thanks for your attention.
Soren Andersen