Re: Could automake-generated Makefiles required GNU make?

[Warren Young]

On 11/22/2011 9:18 AM, Nick Bowler wrote:
> ....users who
> have no idea that there's a difference between GNU make and the version
> of "make" that is already on their system.

That's not the user's job today, and there's no reason it would have to 
be in this new world, either.  Autoconf's raison d'etre is detection of 
platform differences.  In most cases, it tries to provide workarounds, 
but if it detects that you do not have some unavoidable dependency, it 
will give a sensible error and stop.

> But when a user building a free software package for the first time in
> their life runs "./configure&&  make", and receives a spew of cryptic
> messages about syntax errors or worse, I suspect that their first
> reaction is not going to be "Whoops!  I should have run gmake instead."

Again, autoconf is in a position to work around this.

One way would be for it to write out a GNUmakefile containing the actual 
build instructions and a Makefile, the latter which would be used only 
when GNU make wasn't used.  It could then "gmake $@" for you.