On Wed, 17 Jan 2001 10:03:36 -0600, "James L. Peterson"
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>A major problem that I have with make is being able to debug the
>makefiles. I end up working on big projects that are supposed to
>be for multiple platforms, so there are a lot of make variables
>and thousands of lines of multiple makefiles. My difficulty is
>in seeing what everything expands to, so I can understand why
>make is (or isn't) doing what it is doing.
I have faced a similar challenge.
One easy debug technique I figured out was to add a rule to one of the
common makefile include
ifdef _SHOWVAR
.show:
$(_ECHO)echo show $(_SHOWVAR) = $($(_SHOWVAR))
endif
where _ECHO defaults to @.
Then in any makefile I was studying operations I could do a
make -f xxx.mak .show _SHOWVAR=variable_name
and see what the dynamic name of the variable was during that
instance.
A second debug technique is the equivalent of a printf() in C. To each
rule in a makefile add a
$(ECHO)echo makefile_name rule_name $(var) etc >> trace.lst
Then run the makefile(s) and you can see a dynamic execution "trace".
This is brute force but very effective when learning a makefile suite.
john alvord
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