110727 - windows 98 (win9x) tinderbox client hangs with w95make and perl system()

Status: VERIFIED WONTFIX

(SeaMonkey :: Build Config, defect)

Description

[John Morrison]

leaf et al,

I was trying to get a tinderbox client set up on Windows 98 (Yeah, I 
know: "What are you. Nuts!"), and I kept hitting a hang condition in
mozilla/dom/public, which I eventually resolved down to this simple test 
case.

  chdir "d:/mozilla/mozilla/dom/public";
  open( BUILD, "nmake  -f makefile.win install |");
  while( <BUILD> ){
      print $_;
  }
  close( BUILD );

At any rate, guessing that this was some bad buffer/pipe/timing-fu, I
shortened the messages in w95make.c (patch attached) to "fix" the hang.

The purpose of this bug is just to document this hack so that should anyone
else come along and try to do this on win9x again, people know of a 
potential workaround. [Note: this same build does not hang when issuing the 
same command form the command.com command line; it only hangs when executed by 
perl's 'system()' function.]

Will mark WONTFIX in a moment.

Comment 1

[John Morrison]

Attachment: hack to avoid hang; shorten progress messages

Comment 2

[John Morrison]

(Hmm, I seem to have expanded the tabs in that patch. Anyways ...)

Marking WONTFIX.

Comment 3

[John Morrison]

Oh, leaf, one thing (not worth a separate bug) is that "2>&1" is only an 
OS/2 and NT thing. It doesn't work in win9x command.com, and breaks the 
build-seamonkey-win32.pl script. You might want to just add a note to that
file that says to remove that from the system() calls.