On Wed, 2023-05-17 at 22:55 +0100, Costas Argyris wrote: > From a quick search there appear to be many ways > to do this, but some of them are GNU Make-specific, > and I believe these Makefiles (Basic.mk and those > included by it) have to work with any Make, not just > GNU Make.
No; those makefiles can only work with GNU Make. You can easily tell by looking at them since they use make functions like call, etc. all over the place, plus pattern rules and all sorts of fancy things :). If you don't already have GNU Make, you would use one of the other methods (like build_w32.bat) to create one. Then after that you can use these makefiles. To remind: the purpose of these is to provide a makefile-based way to _develop_ GNU Make itself, on platforms where we can't run ./configure to get an automake-generated makefile. If you need to build GNU Make from scratch there's not much benefit from using Basic.mk, because it will just rebuild everything every time just like the build_w32.bat etc. files. You don't save anything. But if you're doing ongoing development (edit/build/test cycle) and you don't want to have to recompile all files every time you change something, and you can't run ./configure, then you can use an already- built GNU Make and these makefiles to shorten your development cycle.
