Most, if not all, of those projects I have retrieved from CVS I have
been able to use the "./configure; make; make install" incantation,
so -
recognizing that Emacs is a large and complex program with different
needs to most other programs - I would still like to know what the
reason for this is.
It can be done, but Emacs' Makefile has not been worked on sufficiently
to allow it to both work and be fast: checking whether bootstrap
is needed or not can be costly if you want to do it right (it's OK,
tho, since we can just be conservative as we do now) but more
importantly
the best way to bootstrap is not always the same and since
bootstrapping
can take a while...