> Given the whole GNU make vs BSD make incompatibility, I was curious about
> why some porting schemes use the latter.  Are there any advantages to it?

The GNU-Darwin project took as their starting point a collection of several
thousand packages which already work on FreeBSD.  In order to take
advantage of this pre-existing collection, they created a build system
which modifies Darwin to closely approximate FreeBSD.  It works well,
in the sense that many things compile and run.

The Fink project, on the other hand, took as its starting point the desire
to adapt existing packages to work as well as possible with Darwin,
including unique features of Darwin such as the way Darwin handles shared
libraries. 

I have seen references on the GNU-Darwin site to the fact that a number of
upstream packages are starting to implement Darwin-only features like the
.dylib system of shared libraries, and noting that GNU-Darwin is now able
to take advantage of those features.  In some cases, those upstream
packages got their changes directly from Fink; in other cases, they are
using updated versions of libtool which were created with the help of Fink
developers.  I'm sure that there are also many cases where the upstream
maintainers independently adapted their programs to work efficiently with
Fink.   The beauty of open source is that all of these updates are now
available to both the GNU-Darwin and Fink projects.

  -- Dave

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