Re: Per-shell override of path names in make(1)

[Alan Barrett <apb%cequrux.com@localhost>]

On Wed, 06 Feb 2008, Joerg Sonnenberger wrote:
> attached is the core of a patch from pkgsrc that complements and extends
> the DEFSHELL_CUSTOM handling. The patch allows the default location for
> each of the shells (sh, ksh, csh) to be set individually via
> environment.

Getting rid of the assumption behind _PATH_DEFSHELLDIR (that all shells
live in the same directory) is very appealing.  Once you do that, you
can probably rip out the existing DEFSHELL_CUSTOM stuff, letting the new
DEFAULT_SH stuff do the same work instead.

However, I have never understod why make has built-in knowledge of
multiple shells.  Why doesn't it just have knowledge of how to drive
"sh", along with knowledge of where to find the local system's idea of
a good version of "sh"?  Does anybody actually put ".SHELL: name=ksh"
or ".SHELL:  name=csh" in Makefiles, and if so, why can't they start
putting ".SHELL: name=csh path=/wherever/bin/csh foo=bar baz=quux"
instead?

--apb (Alan Barrett)