I wonder why there was no mention of simply contributing these 200 lines to GNU make proper instead of forking. Super cool though.
Also please consider that GNU Make supports so many ancient platforms, like DOS, QDOS, Amiga, Windows 3.1. When I forked GNU Make, the first thing I did was delete all that support for ancient defunct platforms to give me enough room to think about how to approach implementing this feature. I don't think I could have done this if I had to wade through all that code from the start. I'm doing this work just for fun and to help out, and coding is only fun when the code is clean.
I wish I could upvote this more than one time.