Subject: bug#14732: Package dos-mode for ELPA

From: Juanma Barranquero <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 7 Aug 2013 21:49:00 +0200

On Wed, Aug 7, 2013 at 9:18 PM, Eli Zaretskii <[email-masked]> wrote:

> Why does it work for csh, then?

Windows programs are discriminated. nt/INSTALL has had this comment  for years:

  In addition, using 4NT or TCC as your shell is known to fail the
  build process, at least since 4NT version 3.01.

The only "problem" is in this bit of nt/configure.bat:

  rem   See if the environment is large enough.  We need 43 (?) bytes.
  set $foo$=123456789_123456789_123456789_123456789_123
  if not "%$foo$%" == "123456789_123456789_123456789_123456789_123"
goto SmallEnv
  set $foo$=

because of the "%$foo$" (in 4NT/TCC, %$ is a special variable). Just
changing that test from using $foo$ to foo$ would have allowed 4NT to
run configure.bat just fine. I proposed such a change, years ago, and
was told not to. Which is particularly jarring because, AFAICS, that
check is obsolete; modern CMD has no problem with big environments,
and even if the check still makes sense in old COMMAND.COM, we've been
adding things to configure.bat for a long time without bothering to
check the environment space required.

   J