[Info-vax] Looking into C-include files on VMS

[Steven Schweda]

Arne Vajhøj wrote:
> Michael Kraemer wrote:
> > Joerg Schilling schrieb:
> >> [...]
> >> I am currntly trying to compile "smake"
> >
> > what's wrong with using stock "make"?
> > Has served well for generations of developers.
> > On VMS they call it "mms" or "mmk" (iirc).
>
> MMS and MMK are great utilities.
>
> But not fully compatible with make.

   Or each other.

   Before we waste even more time on this discussion, you
should know that the fellow who maintains cdrtools also wrote
his own "make" program ("smake"), and his own "tar" program
("star").  Many things are possible, but I'm guessing that you
won't persuade him that MMS, or MMK, or GNU "make", or anything
else is superior to "smake".

   I've been trying for (what seems like) a (very) long time,
with limited success, to get him to adopt some VMS-specific
changes in various cdrtools programs related to process
priorities (where VMS and POSIX differ), scanning every device
on every SCSI adapter looking for optical-writing drives, and
(my absolute favorite) "fwrite(buf, 1, len, f)" versus
"fwrite(buf, len, 1, f)" (where one creates "len" one-byte
records on VMS, while the other creates one "len"-byte record,
and it doesn't matter on UNIX), so I have some idea how easy
it is to get the changes I'd like into this package.  (See the
"vms_notes.txt" file for the details.)  So, I wouldn't advise
starting a fight over the merits of "smake".

   While I realize how little power an argument like the
following has, and how futile it probably is to make this
suggestion, I claim that restarting a never-ending discussion
of fork() here is even less likely to be useful.  I suspect
that Herr Schilling has many productive ways to spend his
time, and asking him to wade through the usual pointless noise
in this forum is probably not the best way to get improved
support for cdrtools on VMS.

   No guarantees, of course, but a DCL procedure to extract C
header files may be found at:

      http://antinode.info/ftp/misc/cheader.com

Without changes, it'll try to put them into the system-wide
directories, which will probably fail for a non-privileged
user, but it should be easy to change the destination(s) to
something writable by a normal user.  As always, complaints
are welcome.