Re: [gnu-prog-discuss] Could automake-generated Makefiles required GNU make?

[Paul Smith]

On Tue, 2011-11-22 at 18:33 +0100, Ralf Corsepius wrote:
> But I recall there had been massively broken gmake 
> releases and releases with major functional changes, which had broken
> a lot.

I don't believe that this is so.  There have been changes which broke
some makefiles here and there, and sometimes popular ones (for example
there was a small change which broke two rules in the Linux kernel
makefiles, which caused some annoyance) but "massively broken" is not
accurate.

Somewhere (lost it now) someone mentioned needing make to build GNU make
(bootstrapping).  In fact, GNU make has always provided a "build.sh"
shell script that can be used if you don't already have any version of
make.  This script doesn't attempt to do build avoidance, of course, but
for a program the size of GNU make this is not so important... and
anyway, once you've built it the first time you'll have a "make" you can
use for future attempts.

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