Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!ulysses!smb
From: smb@ulysses.homer.nj.att.com (Steven M. Bellovin)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: 'nmake' manual pages
Keywords: nmake manual
Message-ID: <11580@ulysses.homer.nj.att.com>
Date: 22 May 89 20:45:04 GMT
References: <1989@internal.Apple.COM>
Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill
Lines: 13

Several people have complained about the quality of nmake and/or
its documentation.  Nmake is part of the Toolchest precisely because
AT&T chose not to make it an official product.  This may be smart
or stupid -- that's a business call, and I won't try to second-guess
it in public.  But among the factors that go into such a decision
are the costs -- debugging, maintenance, documentation (yes, that
costs money (a lot of it) to produce -- etc.  It could be that
someone decided that the market for nmake was too small to make
the investment worthwhile.  Another factor is product line
compatibility -- as noted by many, nmake is quite incompatible
with standard make.  That's a serious matter to those who decree
what is the One True System V -- and rightly or wrongly, a lot
of stuff has been rejected on those grounds.