From what I can tell the make in NetBSD (unlike the ones in OpenBSD or FreeBSD) doesn't try BSDmakefile when given no arguments. It only looks for makefile and Makefile. The man pages say this. The source code, unless I missed something, also says this. As far as I can tell, this has always been the case.
Can someone confirm and do you know why the difference between the BSDs on this?
It came up for me when trying to build the January Rakudo Star. After I run Configure --gen-parrot in the base directory as the instructions say I eventually get this error:
Code:
cd 3rdparty/dyncall && BUILD_DIR=. make
make: no target to make.
make: stopped in /usr/local/src/lang/rakudo-star-2012.01/nqp-2012.01/3rdparty/dyncall
*** Error code 2
I believe it is because the file BSDmakefile in there is not being seen by make. The nqp makefile causes dyncall's configure to be called, but that isn't like a GNU configure script. It doesn't create any makefiles just sets up some other config files. So when nqp's makefile then calls make with no arguments it can't find any makefile.
I'm thinking I should tell someone about this but I'm not sure who or how. I guess it would be the rakudo people maybe.