[DangerousPie]

Ignoring the fact that I doubt that the original post was serious:

Of course you can patch the software and in the long term that will of course be the best solution. But it can take a long time until that patch actually makes it into the main repo, and even longer until it will be in the default `make` on all major distributions. So if you want to use this feature right now then writing a patch is useless for you, unless you only ever use it on your own machine.

The big advantage of the workaround is that it actually works with current versions of make.

[snoopybbt]

Oh, I see your point.

Anyway, it was my small contribution to the discussion :-)