Checking application of dependencies from make rules without recipes

[SF Markus Elfring]

Hello,

I got some special software development experiences by the usage of
the program “GNU Make 4.2.1-1.7” on my openSUSE Tumbleweed system.
The functionality “Generating prerequisites automatically” is desribed
in the manual. I would like to check again how good this works at the moment.

I am trying also a software out where such build dependencies are provided
by the tool “ocamldep”. Unfortunately, I observe still broken build tries
because of missing files which should have been built before.
I started to “fix” this for my needs by the addition of small make functions
which construct extra rules. But it seems that such special stuff should usually
not be needed according to the documentation.

I would appreciate further advice for this issue.

Are there any difficulties (or open issues) to consider for the handling
of make rules with empty recipes?

Regards,
Markus