Mike Hearn m.hearn@signal.qinetiq.com writes:
Devils advocate: seeing as quite a few BSD users (at least the ones I know) already have gmake installed, it's free software and easily available in ports, why are we putting effort into portability to BSD make? Is there ever a situation where a user will have BSD make but be unable to use gmake?
Maybe not, but that's not a reason not to be portable. You can make the same argument with gcc, of course we could require everybody to install gcc, but it's better to make the code portable. It's even more important for makefiles, because if someone wants to port to a new platform and they can't even start to build they won't get anywhere; while if it builds except for some compilation errors there's a good chance they can fix them and submit patches.