This directory contains the 3.79.1 release of GNU Make.

See the file NEWS for the user-visible changes from previous releases.
In addition, there have been bugs fixed.

Please check the system-specific notes below for any caveats related to
your operating system.

For general building and installation instructions, see the file INSTALL.

If you need to build GNU Make and have no other `make' program to use,
you can use the shell script `build.sh' instead.  To do this, first run
`configure' as described in INSTALL.  Then, instead of typing `make' to
build the program, type `sh build.sh'.  This should compile the program
in the current directory.  Then you will have a Make program that you can
use for `./make install', or whatever else.

Some systems' Make programs are broken and cannot process the Makefile for
GNU Make.  If you get errors from your system's Make when building GNU
Make, try using `build.sh' instead.


GNU Make is free software.  See the file COPYING for copying conditions.


Documentation
-------------

GNU make is fully documented in the GNU Make manual, which is contained
in this distribution as the file make.texinfo.  You can also find
on-line and preformatted (PostScript and DVI) versions at the FSF's web
site.  There is information there about ordering hardcopy documentation.

  http://www.gnu.org/
  http://www.gnu.org/doc/doc.html
  http://www.gnu.org/manual/manual.html

You can also find the latest versions of GNU Make from there.


Bug Reporting
-------------

You can send GNU make bug reports to <bug-make@gnu.org>.  Please see the
section of the GNU make manual entitled `Problems and Bugs' for
information on submitting useful and complete bug reports.

You can also use the FSF's online bug tracking system to submit new
problem reports or search for existing ones.  A web interface is
available here:

  http://www-gnats.gnu.org:8080/cgi-bin/wwwgnats.pl

Use the Category "make".

If you need help using GNU make, try these forums:

  help-make@gnu.org
  help-utils@gnu.org
  news:gnu.utils.help
  news:gnu.utils.bug


CVS Access
----------

The GNU make source repository is available via anonymous CVS from the
GNU Subversions CVS server; look here for details:

  http://www.gnu.org/software/devel.html

Please note: you won't be able to build GNU make from CVS without
installing appropriate maintainer's tools, such as automake, autoconf,
GNU make, and GCC.  There are no instructions on this included with the
tree, so you must be familiar with the installation and use of these
tools.  We make no guarantees about the contents or quality of the
latest code in the CVS repository: it is not unheard of for code that is
known to be broken to be checked in.  Use at your own risk.


Ports
-----

  - See README.customs for details on integrating GNU make with the
    Customs distributed build environment from the Pmake distribution.

  - See readme.vms for details about GNU Make on OpenVMS.

  - See README.Amiga for details about GNU Make on AmigaDOS.

  - See README.W32 for details about GNU Make on Windows NT, 95, or 98.

  - See README.DOS for compilation instructions on MS-DOS and MS-Windows
    using DJGPP tools.

    A precompiled binary of the MSDOS port of GNU Make is available as part
    of DJGPP; see the WWW page http://www.delorie.com/djgpp/ for more
    information.

Please note there are two _separate_ ports of GNU make for Microsoft
systems: a native Windows tool built with (for example) MSVC or Cygwin,
and a DOS-based tool built with DJGPP.  Please be sure you are looking
at the right README!


System-specific Notes
---------------------

It has been reported that the XLC 1.2 compiler on AIX 3.2 is buggy such
that if you compile make with `cc -O' on AIX 3.2, it will not work correctly.
It is said that using `cc' without `-O' does work.

One area that is often a problem in configuration and porting is the code
to check the system's current load average.  To make it easier to test and
debug this code, you can do `make check-loadavg' to see if it works
properly on your system.  (You must run `configure' beforehand, but you
need not build Make itself to run this test.)

Another potential source of porting problems is the support for large
files (LFS) in configure for those operating systems that provide it.
Please report any bugs that you find in this area.  If you run into
difficulties, then as a workaround you should be able to disable LFS by
adding the `--disable-largefile' option to the `configure' script.

On systems that support micro- and nano-second timestamp values and
where stat(2) provides this information, GNU make will use it when
comparing timestamps to get the most accurate possible result.  However,
at the moment there is no system call (that I'm aware of) that will
allow you to *set* a timestamp to a micro- or nano-second granularity.
This means that "cp -p" and other similar tools (tar, etc.) cannot
exactly duplicate timestamps with micro- and nano-second granularity.
If your build system contains rules that depend on proper behavior of
tools like "cp -p", you should configure make to not use micro- and
nano-second timestamps with the --disable-nsec-timestamps flag.
