For a long time, I've been updating org from git every week or two via:

  update-org () {
      (cd $HOME/SOFTWARE/EMACS/org-mode && git pull && make)
  }

and I have emacs pointed at that directory.   This is on NetBSD where
"make" is BSD make.

Today, I updated again and got:

  make: "/home/gdt/SOFTWARE/EMACS/org-mode/Makefile" line 6: Need an operator
  make: "/home/gdt/SOFTWARE/EMACS/org-mode/Makefile" line 87: Need an operator
  make: Fatal errors encountered -- cannot continue

  make: stopped in /home/gdt/SOFTWARE/EMACS/org-mode

and it seems recent changes have required beyond-POSIX-make features.

This seems unfortunate; I don't understand why building org has to be so
complicated.  If it is complicated, it seems best to use
autoconf/automake, which already have worked out most of the portability
issues.

At the very least a dependency on GNU make should be documented, if that
is indeed an intentional decision by the community.   (I haven't seen
any discussion, but I confess to not quite keeping up with with
emacs-orgmode traffic.)

Greg