Re: Simple way to ascertain whether we're running on Windows?

[David Boyce]

A few months ago I sent in a simple (one line!) patch to create a 
builtin $(MAKE_HOST) variable describing the platform make was built 
on. For those familiar with the $^O variable in Perl, this would be 
entirely analogous and could save a lot of runtime work with uname et 
al. I never heard back and have no idea whether it got into CVS or 
not. The original email is appended.

-David Boyce

[Original email]
=======================================================================
Either I've missed something obvious in the GNU make docs or this is 
a fairly useful one-line patch:

--- variable.c.orig     Fri Dec 10 23:14:28 2004
+++ variable.c  Fri Dec 10 23:21:46 2004
@@ -578,6 +578,7 @@
           (remote_description == 0 || remote_description[0] == '\0')
           ? "" : remote_description);
   (void) define_variable ("MAKE_VERSION", 12, buf, o_default, 0);
+  (void) define_variable ("MAKE_HOST", 9, MAKE_HOST, o_default, 0);

 #ifdef  __MSDOS__
   /* Allow to specify a special shell just for Make,

Of course the effect is to expose the MAKE_HOST triple which 
configure has already determined:

% cat Makefile
all:; @echo MAKE_HOST=$(MAKE_HOST)

% make
MAKE_HOST=sparc-sun-solaris2.9

And the canonical use would be in conditionals:

ifneq (,$(findstring Linux,$(MAKE_HOST)))
...
endif