gmake schedule

[Don]

When trying to clean up my office's make system,
I began experimenting with techniques described in the
latest O'Reilly GNU Make book. The $(eval $(call ...))
scheme looks promising.

However, I very soon ran into an 'eval' bug reported
about thirty months ago (i.e., long eval strings caused
gnu make to report exhausted virtual memory).

This leads me to two questions:
(1) are the latest gnu make features (e.g., eval) encouraged and
stable, or are they considered experimental or fringe
elements of gnu make?
(2) it's a pain for me to rapidly update software in my office;
so, if 'eval' is stable and recommended in the 3.81rc's,
it would be valuable to know when 3.81 is to be released,
or if the latest 3.81rc is likely to be functionally identical to
the final release for common platforms (e.g., linux, nt, sun).

Thanks.

-- Don