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".
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").
sed: sbase sed
Sad sidenote on m4, that even with strict POSIX [1], you still have no clue if `define` will turn into “” or “define” due to a split between AT&T on one hand and GNU and BSD (all of them?) on the other that POSIX did not rule one way or the other. It gets even worse when you realise that some m4 implementations have “constants” like `windows` so that “Stained glass windows” can turn into “Stained glass 0”. But I guess this can be expected when you are dealing with a tool that has evolved in multiple directions since 1977?
[1]: https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/m...
Some communities(iglunix, kisslinux, carbs linux, wyvertux, oasis linux, ...) are actively researching alternatives to the "standard" coreutils. You could check what they use, perhaps you'll find something interesting and strict. But general source is digging of course :)
> But I guess this can be expected when you are dealing with a tool that has evolved in multiple directions since 1977?
Exactly. 100% conformance isn't always possible, especially when standard is unclear on some things.
With a strict POSIX implementation, you could develop against it and if it works correctly on your system it should also work correctly with pretty much any other make implementation out there.
Personally, I was so frustrated recently about this that I was looking for exactly what pdpmake offers and could not find anything. Thus I am now very thankful that I do not need to write it myself. But there is still plenty of room for strict POSIX tools like this for: awk, sed, m4, etc.