Wireshark can be built using either CMake or autotools. CMake is supported on all platforms and required for building on Windows and macOS. Autotools is supported on UNIX and UNIX-like systems (other than macOS). Generally we prefer to require a portable make rather than writing portable makefiles[1]. That means GNU Make. See also [2] for all the pitfalls involved in writing portable makefiles. However requiring very recent GNU Make versions is discouraged out of ease-of-use concerns. Currently Wireshark should build with any reasonably recent GNU Make version (released say in the last ten years). You are encouraged to report any autotools portability problems in the Wireshark bug tracker[3] but please be advised that vanilla POSIX make is generally not sufficiently powerful (or convenient) to build a large software project like Wireshark so GNU Make is the target implementation. In particular it is an explicit goal to support VPATH builds. [1]http://make.mad-scientist.net/papers/rules-of-makefiles/ [2]https://www.gnu.org/savannah-checkouts/gnu/autoconf/manual/html_node/Portable-Make.html#Portable-Make [3]https://bugs.wireshark.org