I had some mail outages over the weekend so I didn't see the original message in this thread (I may still get it). Checking the archive though, it appears that there are complaints about GNU-make-isms in the message/Makefile{,.in}.
My intent is to indeed check in all the generated files, so that normally no one would ever have to run "make catalogs". My intention is that I would run those when the mailman.pot file needed updating, or when I got new translations and wanted to update the various language .po files.
So, I'm not concerned about GNU-make-isms for "make catalogs". That's why "make all" and "make install" don't depend on any of the generated files. I should probably add a comment to the top of messages/Makefile.in just saying that "make catalogs" requires GNU make.
-Barry