Install make 3.75 on ubuntu 15.10

Question

I am new to ubuntu. I am looking for any help in installing GNU Make version 3.75 or other older version on ubuntu 15.10. I understand that the package for older version doesnot exist for ubuntu 15.10 and I am not able to get the instruction anywhere on how to get the packages. Any help regarding this is appreciated.TIA

Answer 1

sudo apt-get build-dep make
wget http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/make/make-3.75.tar.gz
tar xvf make-3.75.tar.gz
cd make-3.75
./configure
make
sudo make install prefix=/opt/make-3.75
# or sudo make install to install it into /usr/local

Why do you need this? As arved suggests: if your Makefiles are 20 years old and incompatible with current versions of make, and can't be fixed, you probably have bigger problems elsewhere. Whatever those Makefiles try to do may require some tweaking to work on Ubuntu 15.10.