On 4/19/25 13:16, Sam Varshavchik wrote:

After digging through make's documentation, a clue emerged:

#    If an included makefile cannot be found in any of these directories
# it is not an immediately fatal error; processing of the makefile
# containing the 'include' continues.  Once it has finished reading
# makefiles, 'make' will try to remake any that are out of date or don't
# exist.  *Note How Makefiles Are Remade: Remaking Makefiles. Only after
# it has failed to find a rule to remake the makefile, or it found a rule
# but the recipe failed, will 'make' diagnose the missing makefile as a
# fatal error.

This is for GNU make, I suppose, but I doubt that behavior is portable and can be assumed by Automake.


So, a nonexistent include is not an error if make can find a rule that builds it. It then gets suppressed.

Oh, and there's also a:

-include FILENAMES…

which never complains about missing makefiles... how about that...
That is definitely not portable.



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