autoconf and testing make

[Stephane Bortzmeyer]

I recently had a problem on a Solaris machine where make was not in
the PATH (it was installed in /usr/ccs/bin/make) but gmake is
available.

The configure script (produced by autoconf 2.61) did not detect that
make was missing (may be because make can be specified later by the
user, unlike programs like sed or awk, so its presence is not
required). But the compilation failed:

% gmake
make  all-recursive
gmake: make: Command not found
gmake: *** [all] Error 127

"make" was called and not $(MAKE) :-(

The configure script tested:

configure:18436: checking whether make sets $(MAKE)
configure:18461: result: no

And the Makefile contained (there is a @SET_MAKE@ in Makefile.in).

SET_MAKE = MAKE=make

Which seems contradictory to the comment in the source code of
AC_PROG_MAKE_SET:

# Define SET_MAKE to set ${MAKE} if Make does not do so automatically.
# If Make does not run the test Makefile, we assume that the Make
# program the user will invoke does set $(MAKE).