Using 'echo' in a makefile/what shell is used?

["Kris Huber" <khuber53@attbi.com>]

I have a Makefile with which normally ‘make help’ gives a nice help
message about the targets in the makefile, etc.  But on my debian system
that help message doesn't print correctly due to ‘\t’ not expanding to
tab and ‘\n’ not expanding to cause new lines.  I finally figured out
that I can use ‘echo –e’ to print the help text correction from within
gmake.  I'd like to make this the default behavior on my system so the
Makefile remains unchanged, however.  I can use the ‘shopt –s xpg_echo’
command in my .bashrc file to make bash have this behavior, but yet this
doesn't have effect apparently for the commands given by gmake.  Nor
does the variable $BASH_VERSION seem to exist within the gmake
framework.  Does gmake do it's own emulation of a command shell similar
to /bin/sh or /bin/bash?  Can I make the default echo command from
within gmake always behave as though it had the '-e' option?

Thanks for any help,
Kris