Re: Require GNU make?

["ISHIKAWA,chiaki" <ishikawa at yk dot rim dot or dot jp>]

(2014/05/29 22:23), Richard Earnshaw wrote:
> On 29/05/14 14:06, Ralf Corsepius wrote:
> > On 05/29/2014 02:54 PM, Richard Earnshaw wrote:
> >
> > > Not directly relevant, but I put a feature into the newlib build earlier
> > > this year that relied on a GNU make extension.  There were no objections
> > > at the time I did that.
> > Correct me if I'm wrong, but IIRC, GCC already requires gmake.
> > As newlib is commonly used with GCC, probably everybody who uses newlib
> > also uses gmake :-)
> >
> > Ralf
>
> Possibly.  As I said, it's not directly relevant...
>
> I tend to build all off gcc/binutils/gdb/newlib in one go, so always use
> gmake for the lot.
>
> R.

Hi,

I don't know the recent code, but at least long time ago,
'Makefile' for gmake used portable constructs only so that gmake source 
files can be compiled and linked to produce gmake binary with BSDmake 
and other variants of make look-alikes. (I think there was even a 
special makefile for DOS-based DeLorie-GCC environment)

There is a bootstrapping issue of native binutils tools
for a new CPU, say, when there is only a limited set of available tools 
under a given OS for which the CPU vendors are providing initial support 
limited. Selection of GNUmake or BSDmake can be such an issue.

But, today, we have Cygwin that runs well (albeit slowly in terms of 
I/O) under Windows even so that cross-compilation using gmake is 
possible under Windows platforms, POSIX-platforms such as linux, Mac 
OSX, FreeBSD, Solaris, and even on a single board computer environemtn 
Raspberry-PI using Debian-based linux distribution.

Creating a cross-compilation chain using GCC and binutils for a new CPU 
is not an impossible task [or it is not that difficult to write a 
wrapper that lets a proprietary cross-compiler from the CPU vendor to 
understand options passed to GCC reasonably well for compilation 
purposes at least], I think using gmake-specific constructs in 
Makefile(s) for native and cross binutils is OK as long as it is clearly 
documented and self-checking code is embedded in Makefile.
We don't want incorrect compilation that produce seemingly complete 
binary due to the mishandling of non-portable make rules, and such.

Maybe someone who has ported binutils tools RECENTLY to a new CPU using
the proprietary (cross-)compiler (and assembler and linker, more 
importantly) from a CPU vendor and had some difficulty because of the 
limitation of tools on the particular OS which the CPU vendor chose for 
initial support can comment on this.
I doubt difference of make versions is not a major cause of headache 
these days (in principle!)

Just a thought from an observer who has used microprocessors since late 
1970's...