Have Win DMD use gmake instead of a separate DMMake makefile?

[Nick Sabalausky]

Although it took longer than I expected to get around to it, I'm
working on a release-generator tool for DMD. I'm finding that a very
significant amount of the effort involved (much more than I expected)
is discovering and dealing with all the fun little differences between
the posix and win32 makefiles (and now we have some win64 makefiles as
well).

Efforts can be made to decrease these differences, but simply
having them separate makefiles in the first place (let alone using
completely different "make"s: GNU make vs DM make) is a natural
invitation for divergence.

No disrespect intended to Digital Mars Make, but since GNU make appears
to be more feature-rich, have wider overall adoption, and is freely
available on Windows as a pre-built binary
<http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/make.htm>: Would it be
acceptable to use gmake as *the* make for DMD? Ie, either convert the
windows makefiles to gmake, or expand the posix makefiles to support
windows?

I'd be willing to give it a shot myself, and I could trivially
write a small batch utility to download Win gmake and put it on the
current PATH, so that nobody has to go downloading/installing it
manually. I would do this *after* finishing the release-generator tool,
but afterwords it would allow the tool's implantation to be greatly
simplified.

Is this something that would be acceptable, or does building DMD for
Windows need to stay as DM make?