Do you pull the entire toolchain inside the makefile if it doesn't exist in the host? Or you're just using it as a glorified alias over the (rather arcane) podman container run/docker run calls?
Also, how do you solve the problem of actually bootstrapping over different versions of docker/podman/make? Do you have some sort of ./makew like how Maven uses to bootstrap itself?
You certainly can have Make pull in dependencies... But I would usually just have Make look for the dependencies and ask the user to install them.
You would want to mark the dependencies anyway, since when you update your compiler, IMHO, that invalidates the objects compiled with that compiler, so the compiler is a dependency of the object.
That said, I don't distribute much software. What works for personal software and small team software may not be effective for widely distributed software that needs to build in many environments.
Also, how do you solve the problem of actually bootstrapping over different versions of docker/podman/make? Do you have some sort of ./makew like how Maven uses to bootstrap itself?