"J. David Bryan" wrote:
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So I really recommend doing something "on top of" the gpc executable, e.g. a little wrapper script (batch file under Dos/Windows)....
The problem with little wrapper scripts is that they can be bypassed unintentionally (e.g., someone forgets to use "our-gpc" and uses "gpc" directly, or changes their local PATH so that the wrapper directory appears after the GPC directory, etc.).
I don't know what your company environment is, but I use an alias to call gpc or gcc. However that doesn't work for makefiles on this system (W98 + 4dos and DJGPP), but it handles command line invocations. The (4dos) aliases I use (watch out for line wrap) are:
[1] c:\dnld\scratch\iocaine>alias gcc iff ".%1." == ".." THEN ^ *gcc --help ^ ELSE ^ *gcc -W -Wall -ansi -pedantic -gstabs+ %1& ^ ENDIFF
[1] c:\dnld\scratch\iocaine>alias gpc iff ".%1." == ".." THEN ^ *gpc --help ^ ELSE ^ *gpc --standard-pascal %1& ^ ENDIFF
and I can circumvent them by entering "*gcc" or "*gpc".
Even if they all could read a default configuration file, I can see no reasonable way of making that portable everywhere. The most reasonable location would be in the directory where the executable is found, but that leads to clutter. Then comes a standard subdirectory of the executables directory, but that leads to system conventions and possible name clashes. All the world is not Unix, so that eliminates a lot of other conventions.
I thoroughly agree that it should be possible to set local usage conventions and enforce them. The how is another matter.