-## To solve the freshness issue, we used to use a third file "witness-emacs"
-## which was used to witness the fact that there is a bootstrap-emacs
-## executable, and then have dependencies on witness-emacs rather than
-## bootstrap-emacs, but that lead to problems in parallel builds (because
-## witness-emacs needed to be free from dependencies (to avoid rebuilding
-## it), so it was compiled in parallel, leading typically to having 2
-## processes dumping bootstrap-emacs at the same time).
-## So instead, we replace the witness-emacs dependencies by conditional
-## bootstrap-dependencies (via $(BOOTSTRAPEMACS)). Of course, since we do
-## not want to rely on GNU Make features, we have to rely on an external
-## script to do the conditional part of the dependency
-## (i.e. see the $(SUBDIR) rule ../Makefile.in).
-
-.SUFFIXES: .elc .el
-
-## These suffix rules do not allow additional dependencies, sadly, so
-## instead of adding a $(BOOTSTRAPEMACS) dependency here, we add it
-## separately below.
-## With GNU Make, we would just say "%.el : %.elc $(BOOTSTRAPEMACS)"
-.el.elc:
- @cd ../lisp; $(MAKE) $(MFLAGS) compile-onefile \
- THEFILE=$< EMACS="$(bootstrap_exe)"
-
-## Since the .el.elc rule cannot specify an extra dependency, we do it here.
-$(lisp): $(BOOTSTRAPEMACS)
+## To solve the freshness issue, in the past we tried various clever tricks,
+## but now that we require GNU make, we can simply specify
+## bootstrap-emacs$(EXEEXT) as an order-only prerequisite.