Re: Native WIN32 GNU make?

[Greg Chicares]

On 2007-05-08 23:47Z, Mark Txx wrote:
> 
> background:
> We currently use GNU make to build on Solaris, Linux and Windows XP +
> 2000. On Windows, we use cygwin and make 3.80 that is built to run with
> cygwin.

First, try make-3.81 instead of make-3.80 .

> We use a project build system that is similar to the one in discussed in
> "Managing Projects with GNU Make" by Mecklenburg.

For those (like me) who don't know that book, it'd be more helpful
to describe what you're doing, and even better to show a minimal
testcase that reproduces the problem.

> Lately we have
> experienced quite a few difficulties with our Windows builds with
> "Resource temporarily unavailable".

What's happening when that message appears? Does it occur when
a particular command appears in a rule, for example, or when a
rule combines several commands in a pipeline? One way to find
out more is to run 'make -d'.

> Only machines with a large amount of
> RAM can build successfully.

Can you quantify the RAM requirement?

> Research on the web shows that this related
> to the use of anti-virus or other intrusive software. Unfortunately the
> solution offered, remove the anti-virus SW, is not acceptable to our IT
> group.

Have you actually tried running with that software turned off,
and confirmed whether that solves the problem?

> Has anybody used recent "native" WIN32 versions of GNU make with
> alternative shells such as sh.exe that comes in UnxUtils.zip? We do not
> use many UNIX commands beyond, sed, rm etc so we are not that demanding
> of our shell but I would hate use DOS. Are there any other open source
> shells for WIN32?

IIRC, that shell is a native port of zsh-3.0.5, which I've used
daily for many years. I use it with a native make-3.81, which I
built with MSYS.

> Any other "native" WIN32 solutions? such as mingw

At mingw.org you'll find MSYS, which may be worth a try. It's a
fork of an earlier version of cygwin.

> I tried to build a native WIN32 GNU make 3.80 with the instructions in
> README.W32 but I had no success.

Using MSYS, you can build make-3.81 with
  ./configure && make
I don't remember whether that worked with make-3.80, but I know
of no reason not to use 3.81 instead.