Re: [CRAZY PROPOSAL] Automake should support only GNU make

[Dave Hart]

>From my perspective as a maintainer of the reference implementation of
NTP, I value make portability and would be disappointed to see
Automake become GNU-make-specific.  We strive to make our tarballs
easy to build and install on a wide variety of new and old systems.
As an example, until a little over a year ago when NTP 4.2.6 was
released, our stable release supported K&R C compilers.  Requiring GNU
make would reduce the portability of NTP, unless we were to bundle GNU
make source and build it when needed, which is likely not an option
for us as our project has a BSD-derived license.

Cheers,
Dave Hart