I can imagine it being useful when there was a clock-mishap and you need to rebuild everything to get valid timestamps going forward. There was a query on this list some time ago about treating everything as phony (I don't remember why they wanted that) which was answered with "try --always-make". I suppose you could go back and look at the original ticket in the bug tracker requesting it and see what the use case expressed there was.
Depending on the makefile, using -B isn't the same as removing everything and rebuilding. As well, when a target is given and you would have to figure out what the entire prerequisite tree is if you wanted to emulate it with rm. That's far from trivial. Philip On Thu, Mar 5, 2026 at 2:18 PM Dan Jacobson <[email protected]> wrote: > > Yes but then what's the point to --always-make when the user could have just > removed all the offending files in the first place? Convenience only perhaps.
