>I just noticed that apparently on Irix, bootstrap's bmake does not set
>MAKE correctly, it seems.  When installing openssh, it correctly builds

bmake certainly sets it - to argv[0].

If argv[0] is empty then all bets are off of course ;-)

>gzip, zlib and starts to build perl.  However, after configuring perl,
>it invokes /sbin/make rather than /usr/pkg/bin/bmake.  The Perl
>configure-script checks if bmake sets MAKE and apparently doesn't find
>that to be the case and uses the default /sbin/make instead.

I just had a quick look at Configure for perl 5.8.0 (I had it handy)
and the test for whether MAKE gets set looks more like it would always
think that it was.  Further, I don't see that it changes the value of $make
afterwards, though I may have missed something.

Shell lossage might be more likely.  Or the args or evironment given to
the configuring of perl might be wrong.

--sjg