Oh I thought this was a recent thread, sorry. When working with porting to OS X, I recommend skipping the makefile completely and building with Xcode simply because if the person wants to eventually maintain and distribute a port, they will need Xcode anyways. So building using bash is nice and all, but OS X users (like windows) don't want to do that, they expect a working binary (as they should I guess ).
Small and clean makefiles are nice, I simply have seen way too many where modifying them was longer than starting from scratch in Xcode. Anyways, if Knitter eventually wants to build linwarrior, I wouldn't mind helping out at all. As for me, I'm super busy right now and am kinda already working on 2 projects. Maybe Knitter will pop up again?