Good break-down of scenarios.
I wonder if we could modularise the OS support into separate loadable
libraries (i.e. os-support-addon) and would it be worth the effort:
1. Define a clean interface for any os-support-addon to implement.
2. Restructure the codebase so that the OS-specific support is moved out into
distinct directories, e.g. 'src/os-support/linux' and
'src/os-support/os2').
3. Out of the box, ship Make with the most common os-support-addons which are
actively maintained and well tested.
4. Update the docs so that users would know how to add their
favourite OS, e.g. by setting
environment variables like 'MAKE_OS_SUPPORT_ADDONS_DIR' and
'MAKE_OS_SUPPORT_ADDONS_TO_ENABLE'.
I'm no C expert in any way and have never touched Make's code base 😅
Just ignore my suggestion if it's already implemented or doesn't make
sense 😁
--
Bahman Movaqar (he/him)
https://linktr.ee/bahmanm
On Thu, 21 Aug 2025 at 10:29, Henrik Carlqvist <h...@poolhem.se> wrote:
>
> On Thu, 21 Aug 2025 12:19:46 -0400
> Paul Smith <psm...@gnu.org> wrote:
> > Hrm, I spoke too seen; I see that KO Myung-Hun also provided patches
> > for GNU Make as recently as 2023.
>
> > I guess we'll just have to hope for the best, and OS/2 users will need
> > to do a lot of testing.
>
> I think that the best would be to discuss this with KO Myung-Hun and any
> others who have provided patches the last years.
>
> I see 3 possible ways forward:
>
> 1) OS/2 support in GNU Make needs to be provided and tested by capable
> developers who are still using OS/2 where they can test their code.
>
> 2) GNU Make is forked by OS/2 users willing to maintain an OS/2 fork.
>
> 3) GNU Make drops support for OS/2 in future versions and any users of OS/2
> which hasn't had any update for more than 20 years will need to stick with an
> older version of GNU Make.
>
> Which way to choose all boils down to how much work anyone is willing to
> contribute for the preferred way forward. Only the OS/2 users know how much
> work they want to spend to keep OS/2 support in future versions of GNU Make.
>
> regards Henrik
>
