Re: RFC: Bump minimum GNU Make version to 3.81

On 6/24/2026 11:30 AM, Andrea Pinski via Gcc wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 24, 2026 at 9:52 AM Jonathan Wakely via Gcc <[email protected]> wrote:
>> Currently we document that GNU Make 3.80 is required. That was
>> released in 2002. GNU Make 3.81 was released in April 2006. I would
>> like to suggest that 20 years is enough time for 3.81 to be
>> widespread.
>>
>> Bumping the requirement to 3.81 would allow us to use the $(abspath
>> ...) function, which we already started using in libstdc++, not
>> realising that it relies on a newer version than our docs require.
>>
>> 3.81 also has $(lastword ...), $(realpath ...), $(or ...), and $(and ...).
>>
>> GNU Make 3.82 from 2010 adds the .ONESHELL feature but maybe 2010 is
>> too modern for our tastes ;-)
> I am ok with this. I thought we already required a much newer gnu make
> anyways for auto-dependencies but it looks like I was wrong.
Certainly happy to see if move forward, 3.80 is ancient.  I think all 
the make-4 issues affecting us have been sorted out.  But I doubt 
there's appetite to move that far.

jeff