NMAKE

[Intel_C_Intel]

I am using Compaq Visual Fortran 6.1 on a PC with XP. Trying to port a
suite of Engineering s/w I have been maintaining for a number of years
on an IBM RS/6000 with AIX. I have a make file that sets OBJ equal to a
long list of *.o files. Converting this to NMAKE on the PC, it
complains that I have too many names in this list. What is the limit on
the number of names in such a list in NMAKE? I have considered
work-arounds based on features of make or linkers on other systems, but
I haven't found info indicating that these features are available with
CVF 6.1 and NMAKE. For instance there is an "r" option for the linker
on AIX that produces a partial link file, and one can presumably do a
number of these with subsets of the code and then do a final link,
linking all these together.

Alternatively one could turn to archive (library) files. The 1993
version of the Make book by O'Reilly describes a notation of the form
libx(file.o) that can be used as a prerequisite to mean that Make
should check the date on the file "file.o" in the library "libx".

Are any of these ideas workable with NMAKE, or is there a better
approach?

Thanks for any suggestions.

[Steven_L_Intel1]

I would think that a static library (LIB) would be the way to go here. I'm not a NMAKE expert (NMAKE is direct from Microsoft). Any reason why you can't use a Developer Studio project instead? It's MUCH easier than messing with makefiles!

Steve

[Intel_C_Intel]

To Steve from Chuck,
Thanks for the reply. What's easy and what's hard depends on where you are coming from and what your objective is. I have been maintaining this code for years with MAKE in Unix systems, and expect to continue doing that. Porting the code to the PC Windows environment will be a parallel development track, and I would like to keep it as similar to the Unix track as possible. I want to be diverted as little as possible by concerns that are unique to the Wintel environment -- thus I would like to avoid having to invest time in becoming familiar with the Developer environment. It would be most convenient for me if I could find as way of using MAKE in Unix and NMAKE in Wintel that would be essentially the same.

[Steven_L_Intel1]

Have you tried looking for a copy of gmake (GNU make) that works on Windows? I'm pretty sure there is one. Microsoft's NMAKE isn't completely compatible with UNIX make.

Steve