Re: make signal text descriptions

[J. Grant]

Hello,

Thank you for your email.

on the 29/10/03 00:03, Paul D. Smith wrote:
> %% "J. Grant" <address@hidden> writes:
>
>   jg> Could the signals and errors that Make displays include the text
>   jg> description of them?  The same way that other programs do not
>   jg> return the errno.h value, but the text that it corresponds too.
>
>   jg> e.g.:
>
>   jg> Signal 127
>
> GNU make does print the signal number as long as it can determine the
> right one.  If you are seeing this, then it means GNU make got a signal
> it couldn't translate.  This often means that the configuration for your
> system was inaccurate, or that your system doesn't provide proper signal
> translation facilities.
>
> Since you don't specify what type of system you're working on I can't
> give more help than that, but your next example seems to imply it's DOS,
> Windows, or similar.  In that case you should check on the
> address@hidden mailing list and see whether signal translation has
> been ported to work on DOS/Windows platforms.

ok, I've cc address@hidden, so maybe someone can tell me if signal 
numbers are decoded.  Would you include this internally? or use a lib etc?

>   jg> z:\bin\make.exe: *** [mak19] Error 255
>
> It is not appropriate for make to translate this code into an errno
> value, because it is _NOT_ an errno value.
>
> This code is the return value from the program that make invoked, and
> that return value is virtually never an errno value.

Ok, sorry, I was only giving errno.h as an example, I misunderstood and 
thought these were make specific signals.

> In the example you give here, for example, the invoked program exited
> with a -1 exit code, which is not a valid errno value.

Is there any reason this is printed as unsigned char then?  Would not -1 
be more appropriate if that was what it was originally?


Kind regards

JG