NASM has, for a long time, reported 'nasm -v' status on stdout. It has been changed in 2.06rc2 to stderr. This has broken a few of my makefiles that have been working for years.
Yes, it was a simple, and more reliable patch to add 2>&1 to $(if $(shell nasm -v 2>&1),do_nasm_things,), but probabl not something that should have been modified, just because... while yes, standard out could be useful to have clean for other purposes...
Just noting you cost me 2 cents.