[LukeShu]

> only available since GNU make 4.0, and some Linux distributions still have older make, made it a hassle to setup. This should improve over time, of course.

That feels like an outdated statement, make 4.0 came out in 2013. The only non-EOL system I can think of off the top of my head that isn't shipping >=4.0 is macOS (because they won't upgrade to anything GPLv3).

However, unfortunately there's a popular CI system (cough CircleCI cough) that's still using Ubuntu 14.04 by default, which has been EOL for almost a year now. (And others, such as Travis-CI, used it by default right up until it was EOL).

Oh, if you appreciate gmsl, you might also appreciate a book by the same author ('jgrahamc), The GNU Make Book. Some of the things in gmsl are certainly hacks, but a lot of it is quite reasonable if you start reading Make macros as "lisp, but with a bunch of extra dollar-signs and commas".

[nemetroid]

> The only non-EOL system I can think of off the top of my head that isn't shipping >=4.0 is macOS (because they won't upgrade to anything GPLv3).

RHEL 7 has Make 3.82. Its regular life cycle ends in 2024, and I assume it will have an extended support period after that.

[LukeShu]

TIL that after the 5 year "full support" period (which is what I had in my head), RHEL has a 5 year "maintenance support" period (and that CentOS matches that 10-year total) (and then the "extended lifecycle support" arbitrarily long after that for whoever wants to pay enough).

(Aside: 3.82 is a surprising version to be stuck with... most distros went straight from 3.81 to 4.0, because by the time the show-stopper bugs in 3.82 were all patched, 4.0 was happening.)

[magv]

Scientific Linux 6.10 has make 3.81, CentOS 7.7 has 3.82. These long-term-support distros have old software by their nature, and sometimes you're just stuck with one of them unfortunately.