I did a deeper dive into OS/2 and I suspect that the current "OS/2" support is actually for ArcaOS not OS/2. I was able to find some VirtualBox ora images for OS/2, all the way up to Warp 4.5, but ArcaOS is proprietary and I didn't find any free images available. But they do have current releases, including one earlier this year.
So, someone else will need to provide support. On Thu, 2025-08-21 at 10:50 -0700, Bahman Movaqar wrote: > 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: I don't see a reason to make loadable libraries. Even the technologies behind creating shared libraries or dlopen()-style modules between POSIX systems, MacOS, Windows, VMS, etc. are quite different and difficult to configure/build for (or even completely unsupported). Today GNU Make is a single stand-alone binary with no config files etc. that need to be installed. Making it more complex would certainly be a big change. And, what's the use? A GNU Make binary built on Linux can only run on Linux, so why force the "Linux-specific" bits into a shared library? However, providing a more-or-less OS-agnostic API that had multiple implementations, which can be chosen at configure time and linked statically to avoid a lot of C preprocessor manipulation would be very nice. A few steps in this direction have been made, in the last few releases. But, the reality is that GNU Make has a surprising amount of OS- specific code and it's not so simple to create such an interface. There are a LOT of areas where 90% of it is common to all OS's, but the last 10% needs to be custom... and it's not the same 10% for each OS. So, you either have a lot of #ifdefs, or you have a lot of code duplication. It would have been amazing if the original authors of GNU Make and the folks who first started porting it to non-POSIX OS's had held firm and forced these types of APIs to be created, but that's not how it was done (for the most part: the Windows port has some code that tries to emulate POSIX interfaces). It would also be nice to use more gnulib, but: * As Colin mentions, there's a catch-22 here because gnulib, to make their own lives easier, do a lot of their work in makefile snippets. * gnulib also doesn't support all the platforms that GNU Make does, including not just OS/2, but also VMS and DOS. -- Paul D. Smith <psm...@gnu.org> Find some GNU Make tips at: https://www.gnu.org http://make.mad-scientist.net "Please remain calm...I may be mad, but I am a professional." --Mad Scientist
