Make behavior on TOPS20 Panda distribution

[Rich Alderson]

From: David Griffith
Sent: Wednesday, March 11, 2020 2:41 AM

> I've successfully managed to get a simulated TOPS20 environment going with
> networking.  Now there's a new strange hitch: the behavior of make.  Would
> someone please look at this and tell me what I'm doing wrong?

> For a simple Makefile, it works fine if I just type "make", but if I type
> "make <target>", I get the commands sent to the command line, but no
> responses.  The display then stalls at the eighth source file.  Strangely, if
> I scroll up in the xterm, it gets dragged back down as if more stuff is being
> printed.

"make" is not native to TOPS-20, and is unknown to the vast majority of TOPS-20
programmers.  The best thing to do is to get the source for make and run it
under DDT to see where it's failing to perform as you expect, and fix it yourself.

It is unfortunate that Unix make was ever ported to TOPS-20, because there was
already a MAKE command which invoked TECO with an empty buffer.  This is the
source of the joke response to "MAKE LOVE"; it has nothing to do with your
issue with the Unix program.

Instead of using a badly ported Unix program, you ought to learn to build
TOPS-20 control files and do your compiles that way.

Just my $0.02.

                                                                Rich