Re: GNU make troubleshooting

[Paul Smith]

On Mon, 2023-07-10 at 20:46 +0200, Bruno Haible wrote:
> The " due to: <huge list of files>" is useless, since these files
> have not changed since the last compilation. (Suggestion: Reduce this
> list by showing only the file with the newest timestamp. Files with
> older timestamps are redundant.)

I can't explain why you are seeing all these files listed if only a few
of them have changed since the last time the target was updated; that's
not how it works for me:

  $ cat Makefile
  all: foo.x bar.x ; @echo hi; touch $@
  %.x: ; touch $@

  $ make
  touch foo.x
  touch bar.x
  hi

  $ touch bar.x

  $ make --trace
  Makefile:1: update target 'all' due to: bar.x
  echo hi; touch all
  hi

Only shows the newer files not all the files.

It's not acceptable (to me) to only show the one newest file, not all
files that are newer than the target, because often you want to know
all the newer files.