I don't see what current problems there are with dmake and nmake that would be fixed by a move to GNU make - both other utilities work to build Perl and build its modules, and Perl does not use a make tool for anything else. But as you already seem to have a pretty clear picture of the steps to take, feel free to add a submodule to ExtUtils::MakeMaker that outputs GNU make syntax under Windows. The module is only "doomed" in the sense that schwern has a talk on this out. So far, there has come no replacement for ExtUtils::MakeMaker that is much better if better at all for building and installing Perl modules.