Re: Goodbye to GNU make's "build.sh" ... ?

[Henrik Carlqvist]

On Sat, 25 Jun 2022 15:28:52 -0800
Britton Kerin <britton.kerin@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Sat, Jun 25, 2022, 1:48 PM Paul Smith <psmith@gnu.org> wrote:
> > If #2 is chosen, then a bootstrap process would involve first obtaining
> > an older version of make, such as GNU make 4.3 or lower, and building
> > that with its build.sh, then using the resulting make to build the
> > newer version.

> I realize it's easy to say and pretty obvious but option 2 from a user
> perspective is sort of horrific.

Would  this "old version of make" have to be GNU make? Otherwise, if the
Makefiles to build GNU make did not rely on ony GNU extensions those future
systems might be able to initially rely on some other version of make like BSD
pmake.

The scary part of relying on an old version of some software is that old
versions sometimes suffer from bit rot caused by changes in language standards
or API changes in libraries.

Maybe we would have to rely on cross compiling GNU make for new systems?

regards Henrik