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# makefiles, 'make' will try to remake any that are out of date or don't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.
