make dependencies not working for me...

[Ed Hartnett]

Howdy all!

I'm a developer working on netCDF, a freeware library for climate and
Earth scientists. Recently I converted from our old time-honored and
hand-crafted Makefiles to automake generated files. 

But for some reason, using the automake generated files, dependency
tracking no longer works. For example, if I do a make check, and find
and fix a bug in one of my code files, and do a make check again, I
get an error like this:

bash-3.00$ make check
Making check in libsrc
make[1]: Entering directory `/home/ed/n3_tmp1/libsrc'
m4 -B10000 attr.m4 >attr.c
if h5cc -DHAVE_CONFIG_H -I. -I. -I.   -Df2cFortran  -g -MT attr.o -MD -MP -MF 
".deps/attr.Tpo" -c -o attr.o attr.c; \
then mv -f ".deps/attr.Tpo" ".deps/attr.Po"; else rm -f ".deps/attr.Tpo"; exit 
1; fi
cc1: error: to generate dependencies you must specify either -M or -MM
make[1]: *** [attr.o] Error 1
make[1]: Leaving directory `/home/ed/n3_tmp1/libsrc'
make: *** [check-recursive] Error 1

Then I have to do a make clean to get things working.

Doesn't automake automatically generate dependencies? Or do I have to
tell it to do so?

What does this mean:
error: to generate dependencies you must specify either -M or -MM

Where do I specify -M or -MM?

Any advice would be appreciated.

Thanks!


-- 
Ed Hartnett  -- address@hidden