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.