Thomas Heijligen src@posteo.de writes:
The current policy with the Makefile is to stay backwards compatible.
That's fine because make is stable, even the GNU flavor. There really shouldn't be anything in a makefile that is an issue for 5 year old make. The dependency requirements are a different matter, and not different from make to meson.
Since meson is not this long around we have to choose a way to go. Personally I had the problem that my system meson from a rolling release distro was to old to build a project from master branch.
That's a clue that something is wrong. I would pull a date out of a hat and say that the meson that was the current formal release on 2020-01-01 should be good enough. So that means the build system should work with meson 0.52.1 or higher.
Another view is that Ubuntu 20.04's included meson ought to be good enough. With any luck that's at least 0.52.1.