GNU Make required for build?

[Kevin Oberman]

> From: Malcolm Purvis <malcolmp at xemacs.org>
> Date: Tue, 16 Nov 2004 21:10:04 +1100
> Sender: xemacs-beta-bounces at xemacs.org
> 
> >>>>> "Norbert" == Norbert Koch <viteno at xemacs.org> writes:
> 
> Norbert> Recent changes seem to force the requirement of GNU make for building
> Norbert> 21.5.  At least my BSD make (FreeBSD 4.10) doesn't understand the
> Norbert> syntax:
> 
> That change was introduced as part of my patch that fixed parallel builds.
> The '+foo' syntax is not from GNU make but from POSIX and I wouldn't have used
> it if I hadn't thought that it was portable.  At the time there was some
> debate about whether some odd systems, such as HPUX had POSIX Makes, but
> nobody considered BSD an issue.
> 
> A quick Google shows that POSIX compliance has been added to FreeBSD's make:
> 
> http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-standards/2004-May/000569.html
> 
> Is it feasible for you to use this fixed version?  If not I'll redo the
> patch.

This feature was added to the FreeBSD base back on July 29, so it has
not been there very long, but, more importantly, it is not in V4 at all
and due to incompatibilities between the new version and the version in
V4, never will be. I suspect many more FreeBSD users are running V4 than
V5, so it would probably be a good idea to avoid this syntax for a while
until V5 gets to be more common. After all, V5 has only been declared
"stable" for about two weeks.
-- 
R. Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer
Energy Sciences Network (ESnet)
Ernest O. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab)
E-mail: oberman at es.net			Phone: +1 510 486-8634