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Is there any way to get GNU make to print a "backtrace" of the targets that led to the command being executed when it fails? I regularly deal with heavily obfuscated makefiles while resolving portability issues building software on a new system, and it seems like this should be an extremely simple thing for make to do that would greatly aid in debugging, but I can't find any way to request it. What I'd like to see is something like:
gcc: error: ...
make[2]: error: gcc ...
make[2]: error building target bar
make[2]: error building dependency bar for target foo
make[1]: error: make -C subdir
make[1]: error building target subdir
make[1]: error building dependency subdir for target all
...
showing the entire dependency path for how the failed command ended up getting executed.
Is there any way to do this?
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The $@ and $< are called automatic variables. The variable $@ represents the name of the target and $< represents the first prerequisite required to create the output file. For example: hello.o: hello.c hello.h gcc -c $< -o $@ Here, hello.o is the output file.
Finally, you can also debug the Makefile by running Make with the debug flag: make -d . This will print all the rules (including built-in ones) that Make tries for each of the targets, and whether or not a rule needs to be run.
backtrace() returns a backtrace for the calling program, in the array pointed to by buffer. A backtrace is the series of currently active function calls for the program. Each item in the array pointed to by buffer is of type void *, and is the return address from the corresponding stack frame.
The usual way to inspect a backtrace of a program is to use an external debugger such as gdb. However, sometimes it is useful to obtain a backtrace programmatically from within a program, e.g., for the purposes of logging or diagnostics. The header file execinfo.
Use remake. It is a patched version of GNU Make that adds improved error reporting, the ability to trace execution in a comprehensible way, and a debugger.
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