Gmake compliance is included for convenience because it may be found on many systems and most make programs are worse than gmake. If you have problems with the make file system and gmake, you are out of luck. Gmake has a debug option, but it gives tons of debug messages. Less than 1% of these debug messages are useful. Important things are missing in these debug messages. Gmake has bug with the VPATH= option. Some of the macros are not expanded correctly. I had to remove all occurrences of $@ $* and $^ on some places for this reason. On some platforms (e.g. OSF1), gmake is not able to correctly recognize the default target. If gmake complains about this, call ./Gmake all To use GNU make create a file called 'Gmake' in you search path that contains: #!/bin/sh MAKEPROG=gmake export MAKEPROG exec gmake "$@" and call 'Gmake' instead of gmake. On Linux there is no gmake, 'make' on Linux is really a gmake. 'Gmake' and 'Gmake.linux' are part of this distribution.