Whenever I download some source code and find that the respective maintainer/author has a Makefile or makefile inside the source tree but requires GNU make specifically I can get really annoyed really fast.
Dear maintainer/author: there are literally dozens of make flavors on Earth and the fact that your source requires the use of GNU make as opposed to BSD make or “some other flavor” should get you thinking. GNU make has this really nice way of picking up files in the current directory in a certain order of precedence (you can see it when having it output what it does). One that implies the use of GNU make is the name GNUmakefile which doesn’t get accidentally picked up by other make flavors. Why is it so difficult to use that instead of the generic name that will get picked up by every other flavor and will cause any other flavor to choke? … And moreover, why does it seem to be so difficult for configure scripts to write it to disk as GNUmakefile?
// Oliver (grumpy and annoyed ;))