AMUSE fails to build from tarball on pre-4.3 GNU Make

[LourensVeen]

Describe the bug
AMUSE (specifically amuse-framework) fails to build when building from a tarball and using GNU Make <4.3:

support/shared/version.mk:4: *** unterminated call to function 'shell': missing ')'.  Stop.

That line contains:

    AMUSE_VERSION := $(shell grep -v '^#' ../../VERSION)

The GNU Make 4.3 release notes say:

WARNING: Backward-incompatibility!
Number signs (#) appearing inside a macro reference or function invocation
no longer introduce comments and should not be escaped with backslashes:
thus a call such as:
foo := $(shell echo '#')
is legal. Previously the number sign needed to be escaped, for example:
foo := $(shell echo '#')
Now this latter will resolve to "#". If you want to write makefiles
portable to both versions, assign the number sign to a variable:
H := #
foo := $(shell echo '$H')
This was claimed to be fixed in 3.81, but wasn't, for some reason.
To detect this change search for 'nocomment' in the .FEATURES variable.

So it seems that the # on that line is the culprit.

• Try to reproduce with GNU Make 4.2.1 or older
• Apply the above fix and test with both older and newer GNU Make

Thanks to @cournoyercloutierc for the report!