There are several problems with the checked-in old exit handling, which aren't resolved by the recently suggested new code.
Old problems are: - the %NONAME-?-NOMSG messages, which are generated by VMS when a program returns a Unix style exit code; an exit code 2 shows as %NONAME-E-NOMSG, Message number 00000002. - VMS style warnings do not stop make. New problems are: - redirecting exit (and _exit, which seems wrong) to vms_exit, where the passed exit code is adjusted, doesn't really know whether this is a make exit code or one passed from an action routine, which can be of any style - in case of an error there are error numbers printed by make, with the adjusted exit codes, these numbers are no longer obvious. It seems that having VMS specific codes for MAKE_SUCCESS, MAKE_TROUBLE and MAKE_FAILURE is the way to go. Easy, as long as these codes are always used. But there are hard coded numbers 0, 1 and 2 as well as EXIT_FAILURE, passed to die() and/or exit(). So I suggest to always use the MAKE_mumble macros and to define them for VMS as posix compatible exit codes. This avoids redirecting exit to vms_exit; this assumes that the exit status of a child process is VMS style, which makes checking for failure simpler; this allows to decode and print the known make error numbers. But it doesn't solve everything. The usual action routines will be VMS utilities which set the VMS style exit codes. Any program which adheres to the VMS style exit codes will work as an action routine as well. That includes all programs which make use of the posix compatible exit codes as well. Action routines, which just return a Unix style number, would need different checks. Although it seems simple to check for zero (when there is no VMS facility code set), it turns out that the child processes, as they are implemented today, never ever return zero. This way it is not possible to find out whether it was successful or not. _______________________________________________ Bug-make mailing list Bug-make@gnu.org https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-make
