>I didn't explain sufficiently. The submakes I'm talking about are my >doing, and I want to conditionalize them on whether >--enable-dependency-tracking is used. > >In for example both ntpq/Makefile.am and ntpd/Makefile.am I'm invoking: > >(cd ../libntp && make libntp.a)
Yes and if you didn't do sub-makes, then the prerequisites for libntp.a would be known (and evaluatable to determine whether to rebuild).
