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.