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

[Paul Smith]

On Sun, 2022-06-26 at 07:34 +0100, Sven C. Dack wrote:
> 3. Allow to build a minimal Make executable, which provides basic and
> traditional Make functionality and does not rely on gnulib, and then
> use it as a bootstrap.

It's certainly a possibility.  But there is already so much ifdef etc.
in GNU make, I'm loathe to increase it dramatically by trying to carve
out some sort of minimalist, but still sufficiently powerful, version
of make.  And, the things we get from gnulib are not really "extra
things" that we can just jettison, so much as replacements for basic
POSIX functions that not all platforms provide, or where the provided
versions are broken in some way on some platform.

If the GNU make source code was well-organized and cleanly modular this
would probably be a far more reasonable proposition but anyone who's
looked at the code can attest that this is far from the case.