[Simh] Platform tests

[Peter Lund]

(Cc'ed Jason because I know he's into weird platforms ;) )


As far as I can tell, the platform detection tests in the current
makefile don't really work.  I think the ones I have in my "build"
repository do work but I'm not really sure.

I have cooked up a little test makefile in order to find out what
detection mechanisms I can rely on.

It would be really great if as many of you as possible could run it,
especially if you have a weird platform you would like SimH to build on
out of the box (i.e. without having to tweak the makefile).

Problems with the current tests:
     1. they look at the makefile macro 'WIN32' -- It doesn't exist in
        my tests with cygwin.  Maybe it's a mingw thing or a Borland
        thing or ...?
     2. cygwin is not detected
     3. OSTYPE is treated as if it were a makefile macro.  It isn't.  It
        does exist in typical shells but as a shell variable and not an
        environment variable (i.e. it hasn't been "exported") so make
        doesn't know about it.
     4. OSTYPE is actually only set by some shells such as for example
        bash and zsh.  It is not required by Posix and therefore the
        small but Posix compliant shell dash doesn't have it.  Dash is
        the default shell of Ubuntu Linux which is one of the biggest
        Linux distributions out there.  Red Hat/Fedora may still be
        bigger but I frankly doubt it.
     5. They are platform tests and not feature tests... but that's a
        battle for another day.

You run the test by putting the attached makefile in an empty directory
and then run 'make > file-to-send.txt'.  Please send file-to-send.txt
either to the list or directly to me.

-Peter
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: Makefile
Type: text/x-makefile
Size: 596 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://mailman.trailing-edge.com/pipermail/simh/attachments/20070923/c81c2b99/attachment-0003.bin>