site_archiver@lists.apple.com Delivered-To: darwin-dev@lists.apple.com Another consideration is that make is governed by a standard, and gnumake extensions may not be compatible. <http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/utilities/make.html>

On Aug 23, 2017, at 10:02 PM, Jeremy Huddleston Sequoia <jeremyhu@apple.com> wrote:

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On Aug 23, 2017, at 11:25, Jens Alfke <jens@mooseyard.com> wrote:

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On Aug 23, 2017, at 10:49 AM, Marcus Johnson <bumblebritches57@gmail.com> wrote:

So yeah, can you guys switch the make utility from gnu to FreeBSD's?

Is FreeBSD's is 100.0% backward compatible with GNU's?

Absolutely not, but if you are depending on GNU extensions for make, you should be using gnumake instead of make. Both are the exact same binary, but gnumake is guranteed to support GNU extensions, and make is not.

FSF adopted GPLv3 for future versions of GNU make, so we've just been stuck in maintenance mode with the last version of GNU make for the past decade.

We used to ship bsdmake as an alternative to GNU make, but that was obsoleted back in Xcode 4 days:

<rdar://problem/10471919> obsolete bsdmake

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If not, that would be a breaking change. I suspect that's the reason.

Even if it is compatible, switching would be a risk to the Core OS build process, since nothing is exactly 100% backward compatible. If I were on Apple's Core OS team, I probably wouldn't see the risk as worth it, especially when it's so easy for developers to install an alternate 'make' tool using e.g. Homebrew.

Many (not all, not xnu) CoreOS projects that used to use make were transitioned to Xcode a few years ago, but yes. There's not really a compelling reason to switch.

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—Jens

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