Re: GNU make 4.2.90 release candidate available

[Paul Smith]

On Wed, 2019-08-28 at 17:35 -0400, Dennis Clarke wrote:
> > This also disables every extension over C, especially POSIX.
> 
> Is this a *bad* thing or a *good* thing ?  What is the actual language
> dialect that GNU Make wishes to be compliant with is the real question.

Like all GNU software, it is written to work with a minimum version but
uses autoconf facilities to take advantage of the newest capabilities
it can detect... that's kind of autoconf's raison d'être.

So, it is not useless to test building with all improvements turned off
because it lets us know whether our attempts to support very old
environments are still working properly.

But I would not recommend using such options when trying to compile an
actual, useful GNU make for everyday use, as it will be full of
workarounds and hacks and won't take advantage of modern POSIX features
which give better behavior and performance.