On Sun, 2022-06-26 at 02:14 +0200, Henrik Carlqvist wrote: > Would this "old version of make" have to be GNU make?
It would need to be some version of make that is supported by automake. As far as I'm aware, automake-generated makefiles are currently intended to run with any POSIX-compliant version of make; I believe that BSD make qualifies. Certainly SunPro make from the late Jörg Shilling would qualify, but I believe it requires a pre-existing make to build (I haven't tried in quite a while). And now that we've lost him I'm not sure who will take up maintenance of that project. Also, I've heard calls for automake maintainers to simplify the generated makefiles by assuming GNU make and taking advantage of GNU make features: then we really WOULD be in a quandary. But I have no idea how likely such a thing is to happen. > 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. Indeed. > Maybe we would have to rely on cross compiling GNU make for new > systems? Another solution, to be sure.