rocky/rpms — comment on commit fcfc9777e79705230041af42143a7e2d4595dba8
File: specs/remake/remake.spec line 12
By rocky:

I think it makes sense to ship remake based on 3.82 independent of what RedHat did for a couple of related reasons: it may be better for users as well as maintainers (um, me).

There are two kinds of improvements going on -- improvements to _make_ and improvements to the debugger and how error messages and tracing information are handled. Speaking strictly as a user of GNU _make_, if I were on RHEL3 I think I would like the possibility of using GNU make 3.82, much the same as I'd prefer using Emacs 23 over Emacs 21 no matter what the distribution version is. GNU make is pretty much upward compatible.

And as the author of the the add ons, I want folks to use the latest release. Often when I undertake something I don't know very much about what I'm doing, but I have a desire to get something done. So earlier releases have major flaws in thinking and coding. The later releases often correct (and I would like to hope that they also hide) the major flaws in my thinking and coding.

Also, I'm not as interested in bug reports on older releases of software as I am on the most recent release. It is not unlikely the newer release just wont have that problem.

So for these reasons I would prefer _remake_ not be marked exclusive to el5 and el6. Although I haven't tried it I would not be surprised if _remake_ worked on RHEL4 and RHEL3.