alternate target platforms

[Terry Westley]

I was under the impression that GNU make has some special features that
support building for alternate target platforms, e.g., Solaris and Win2000.

But, I can't find any references to this in the manual for version 3.79
(April 2000).

Am I mistaken?  Or perhaps these are just a set of conventions that people
use the GNU make features in a certain way to support building the same
target on different platforms.

Background
----------
We've supported several different target environments in the past including
different operating systems and different compilers (VADS Ada and GNAT Ada)
with the Solaris make program.  Since we are evaluating Win2000 as our
next target platform, I'm considering converting all our makefiles to GNU
make and using this on both Solaris and Win2000.  Since I'm doing this anyway,
I figured I might as well learn how others are using GNU make to do this.

Thanks.

--Terry Westley, address@hidden