--with-devkit doesn't control nmake

[Erik Joelsson]

For your build to pick up nmake from some other VS installation means 
you must have that VS installation in your path. Normally, only the 
devkit bin dirs will be in the path if you start with a clean 
environment. We have simply not encountered that before, but it is 
definitely a bug. However, the hotspot build-infra project is currently 
rewriting the hotspot makefiles (see build-infra/jdk9 forest if you are 
interested) and we are getting rid of nmake. This project will go into 
JDK 9 in hopefully not too long a time.

Unless this is causing actual trouble now, we in the build group will be 
reluctant to spend time on fixing the issue. We would of course welcome 
contributions from others if someone is willing to do the work.

/Erik

On 2016-01-08 23:16, Derek White wrote:
> [This is likely a bug, but thought I'd ask it as a question first].
>
> Windows devkits contain an nmake.exe, but the configure and make 
> scripts do not define and consistently use an NMAKE variable to make 
> sure the devkit version is used, as many other commands do.
>
> I had assumed that my builds were using the nmake.exe from the same 
> devkit toolchain as the compilers, etc., but in fact I was using nmake 
> from VS2005, as provided by my company's devops department on my 
> entitlement machine.
>
> I don't believe that actually caused problems in my builds, but it 
> took a while to confirm it, and could easily cause a problem in the 
> future.
>
> Bug or no bug? Thanks!
>
>  - Derek