[tpoacher]

> but writing a makefile and only evaluating against it makes it difficult to guarantee that you will see the same behaviour on a non-GNU system

This would only be true if the entirety of thr GNU suite were necessary for GNU make to work. But it's not, so I always find this kind of argument really weird.

I mean it's not necessarily completely irrelevant criticism, but I somehow only see this level of criticism aimed at GNU tools.

I haven't seen many "you know let's make a variant of ninja because the current one is too ideological let's find another one that's still ninja but has slight differences that we 'all' agree are more basic or standardised somehow".

[ninjin]

You are being overly defensive here. What I wrote had nothing to do with GNU in particular, as I hope I made clear in the very next sentence after the one you cited by stating that the same is true for BSD make implementations and portability. The parent asked about GNU make, thus I logically kept on talking about GNU make.

[tpoacher]

You're right, my apologies. :)

I misinterpreted the whole thread as "what's wrong with writing makefiles for GNU make specifically".

Which is subtly a different question (and to which the answer of course is "nothing, as long as you're happy to specifically use GNU make to run them").