Make 3.81...Bits and Pieces

[NormW]

Greetings All from AU.
A newbie to the list, so excuse the three questions below if they are 
covered in days past.

1. Does the test scripts sub-system included in the source specifically 
exclude support for the Windows platform (than via CygWin or MingW), or 
is this just a 'by-product' of the way they were written?

I tweaked run_make_tests.pl and test_driver.pl to run native in Win2K 
using ActivePerl, only to find there were more OS-dependant pieces in 
some of the test scripts. Is there any point in persisting?

2. The test system creates a 'comments.mk', and while getting that to 
work found either a bug or feature Make 3.81;
If I use 'make -f work\features\comments.mk' then Make produces:
> make: `target' is up to date.

If I cd to the work\features dir and try 'make -f comments.mk':
> There should be no errors for this makefile.

which is the reply the comments test script is expecting. I can think of 
no logical reason why the result would be different just by changing the 
path to the make file. For the curious, 'comments.mk' has:
> # Test comment vs semicolon parsing and line continuation
> target: # this ; is just a comment \
> 	@echo This is within a comment. 
> 	@echo There should be no errors for this makefile.

I've confirmed this with GnuMake 3.81 on Win2K and SuSe 10.3.

3. I wrote a replacement 'build_w32.bat' that shrunk from 22.2k to 8.7k 
and supports normal,debug and clean options for both MingW and MSVC (and 
is based buld_w32.bat in CVS):
> build_w32            Builds MSVC version without debug symbols.
> build_w32 debug      Builds MSVC version with    debug symbols.
> build_w32 clean      Removes MSVC created output files.
> build_w32 gcc        Builds GCC  version without debug symbols.
> build_w32 gcc debug  Builds GGC  version with    debug symbols.
> build_w32 gcc clean  Removes GCC  created output files.
This of any use to the project, as it isn't really a patch and only of 
possible use to Windows builders (Tested using MingW and MSVC6)?

Norm