Re: [bug #41758] VMS Make incorrectly reports archives support present.

[h.becker]

On 05/02/2014 05:44 AM, John Malmberg wrote:
> Follow-up Comment #3, bug #41758 (project make):
> 
> Updated default.c patch with fixed shared image library rule.

That's not a complete fix. It still has the wrong target. The suffix of
such a library is ".olb", not ".exe". The suffix is identical to the
suffix of an object module library. With this implementation it seems to
be enough to also check for a suffix ".exe" in $<. The check for an
image library is done before the check for an object module library, so
in this implementation there is no need to change the latter check for
an additional ".obj".

That raises questions about the suggestion to merge/mix VMS and
Posix/Unix suffixes: can and should a .o be added to a .olb and a .obj
to a .a? Can and should a .so be added to an image library? OK, .so is
not (yet?) in $(SUFFIXES).

With this implementation a couple of processes are created just to do
the suffix checks and, depending on these checks, possibly do the
creation of the corresponding library. It seems that the checks can (and
in my opinion should) be handled within make. I have some ideas how to
implement it, but didn't try to, so far. I would like to see only one
additional action routine (process) for all kind of libraries with a
check whether the corresponding file exists and create it, if it doesn't
exist.

With this implementation, for an image library, when an existing object
module library is found, it is used, and vice versa. That will give an
error when inserting/replacing the image or object module. This should
be OK, as this can be seen as a user error: there shouldn't be an image
and an object library with the same name.