Make 3.80 & 3.81: system call failure on Cray t3E

[Mark Hadfield]

I need Gnu make 3.90 or later on a Cray T3E (the installed version being 
3.77). I have managed to build versions 3.80 and 3.81beta2 from source. 
The "configure" and "make" steps seem to proceed OK (with a few compiler 
warnings in the latter), but the resulting executable in both cases is 
severely non-functional: it fails *all* tests with "make check" and also 
fails to run a simple make file, printing the message

make: *** wait: Interrupted system call.  Stop.
make: *** Waiting for unfinished jobs....

In each case the system command in question *has* run successfully, so 
it appears that make is misinterpreting its return status.

Suggestions are welcome. Details follow...

Details:

The systems "uname -a" is

sn6908 kupe 2.0.5.60 unicosmk CRAY T3E

I tried make 3.80 and then 3.81beta2 from...

  http://make.paulandlesley.org/make-3.81beta2.tar.gz

...the latter being the latest I could find.

Commands to build & test were

  gunzip -c make-3.80.tar.gz | tar -xvf -
  cd make-3.80
  ./configure --prefix=$HOME
  make
  make check

The make-3.80 build generated a number of compiler warnings--I didn't 
keep a record of them. The make-3.81beta2 build generated just one:

  CC-167 cc: WARNING File = function.c, Line = 1612
  Argument of type "unsigned int *" is incompatible with parameter
  of type
          "int *".
          fold_newlines (buffer, &i);
                                 ^
  Total warnings detected in function.c: 1


--
Mark Hadfield            "Ka puwaha te tai nei, Hoea tatou"
address@hidden
National Institute for Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA)