On Tue, 18 Jul 2000, Raab, Andreas wrote:

> Nothing prevents you to use Sun cc with GNU make. Just fix up the
> configuration (or the Makefile itself) so it says "CC = cc" rather than "CC
> = gcc". That's (in a nutshell; not counting compiler/linker flags) all there
> is to it. 
> 
> Incidentally, I think it's no problem at all to have Makefile.in gmake
> dependent. To use it you'll have to run autoconf and (IIRC) autoconf is GNU
> software so there should be a gmake somewhere if autoconf is there. If there
> isn't (no autoconf and no gmake) you'll have to write your makefile from
> scratch anyways so who cares if the template is gmake dependent ;-))

No, you misunderstood the concept of autoconf.

The point of the GNU autoconf tools is that the user who gets a program as
source code just types "./configure" followed by "make", and it works. It
does not require gmake, nor gcc, nor any GNU specific software. The
"configure" program is just a shell script that (most commonly) creates a
Makefile from a Makefile.in template using only tools that exist on each
U*ix, like "sed".

It's only the developer who needs GNU autoconf installed to generate the
configure script from the configure.in description. That script is not
even GPL'ed but distributable under any license the author wishes (see
http://www.gnu.org/manual/autoconf/html_node/autoconf_84.html). 

With a carefully crafted configure script it's possible to generate a
Makefile for that specific system - even if it is as dumb as SunOS
make. All the 'hard' stuff that would need gmake wizardry should be left
to configure.

-- Bert