Re: GNU make troubleshooting

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Bruno Haible <bruno@clisp.org>
> Date: Mon, 10 Jul 2023 21:41:24 +0200
> 
> Paul Smith wrote:
> > Showing the "macroexpanded make sources" is difficult because make
> > doesn't just expand an entire line then parse it.  Makefile syntax is
> > context-sensitive so you can't know how or if to expand parts of a line
> > until you've already expanded other parts.  Of course make could keep
> > track of this for generating this kind of output.
> 
> If no perfect solution to this problem is possible, how about
> implementing a simple approximation first, and then improve it based
> on user feedback?

An approximation to the facts is worse than the facts.

This facility is supposed to show you which files caused a target to
be rebuilt.  Any approximation that doesn't list all of those outdated
files will lose information.

The fact that you saw a long list is a bug that was solved.  Making
Make less capable because of a bug is not wise, IMO.