On 8/20/20 12:08 PM, John Cowan wrote:
>
>
> On Thu, Aug 20, 2020 at 11:55 AM Steve Nickolas <usotsuki@buric.co
> <mailto:usotsuki@buric.co>> wrote:
>  
>
>     Funny you mention ksh since I've been trying to kitbash ksh93 into being
>     able to compile with make instead of the funky build system it currently
>     uses, without a lot of luck.
>
>
> IIRC, Korn used make when developing ksh, but then shipped it with a
> /bin/sh script because it was more portable than make was in those days
> (and still is; there are tools that warn you to use gmake on BSD).  After
> all, a build process (unless it is interrupted) just needs to build, it
> doesn't need to keep track of what has already been built.

He might have started with make for ksh83 and 86, but switched to Fowler's
nmake and then shipped that /bin/sh script in ksh88 for people (everyone,
basically) who didn't have nmake.

> That said, I have no idea what the state of the build process is now.

Changing that was one of the controversial modifications made to ksh93 in
ksh-2020. It's pretty complex.

Here's a paper that describes part of it:

https://www.usenix.org/legacy/publications/library/proceedings/vhll/full_papers/fowler.feature.ps

--
``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer
                 ``Ars longa, vita brevis'' - Hippocrates
Chet Ramey, UTech, CWRU    chet@case.edu    http://tiswww.cwru.edu/~chet/