Paul Smith wrote: > Showing the "macroexpanded make sources" is difficult because make > doesn't just expand an entire line then parse it. Makefile syntax is > context-sensitive so you can't know how or if to expand parts of a line > until you've already expanded other parts. Of course make could keep > track of this for generating this kind of output.
If no perfect solution to this problem is possible, how about implementing a simple approximation first, and then improve it based on user feedback? Because how is a GNU make user supposed to understand a Makefile and the expansion of things like $(1): $$($(1)_OBJS) $$($(1)_LIBS:%=-l%) or $(objpfx)$o$($o-version): $(objpfx)$o; $$(make-link) if 'make' does not help them? [1] > > 3) Single-stepping or tracing function execution. > > Tracing is possible although if we just enable tracing for all variable > expansion you'll get a TON of output. Maybe the user could ask to > trace expansion of certain things only. > > I'm not interested in implementing an "interactive" mode for single- > stepping GNU Make. Maybe someone else wants to do it but my suspicion > is that the code changes needed would be massively disruptive. That sounds like a discussion among GNU make contributors could maybe bring up alternative implementation ideas, that are not so disruptive? Bruno [1] https://www.gnu.org/software/make/manual/html_node/Eval-Function.html [2] https://sourceware.org/git/?p=glibc.git;a=blob;f=Makerules;h=018780c818cab0d4626e31308f013582114fca4f;hb=HEAD#l1043
