Re: Makefile bug in generating mh-loaddefs.el?

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> Date: Wed, 4 Jul 2007 19:06:38 -0400
> From: "David Robinow" <drobinow@gmail.com>
> 
>  1) Windows uses a completely different makefile. One could choose not
> to implement the feature on Windows.

Sure, but then what's the point?  Until now, we tried to do in
makefile.w32-in everything like in Makefile.in.  If what Dan noticed
is a serious problem, shouldn't it be solved on all supported
platforms?

>  2) cp.exe and rm.exe are already required. Wouldn't the user already
> have mv.exe from the same location as cp.exe and rm.exe?

That's what I said: it's another program we need to ask for, and
another test to perform in nt/configure.bat.

> 3) What's wrong with "MV = move" in nmake.defs?

Different versions of Windows have different and subtly incompatible
versions of MOVE.  It might be tricky to write the Makefile's in a way
that works on all those versions.

>  For that matter, why not use copy and del instead of cp and rm ?

The same reason as with MOVE: the behavior is subtly different on
different versions of Windows.  For example, did you know that older
versions of COPY would not copy empty files? did you know that some
versions of DEL accept only one argument, while others accept multiple
arguments?

In sum, I didn't say it's impossible or rocket science, I just said it
would be complicated.