Re: debugging feature for recursive rules

[Ralf Wildenhues]

Hi Karl,

thanks for the report.

* Karl Berry wrote on Sat, Apr 11, 2009 at 02:54:16AM CEST:
> I have found myself needing to go through the complicated shell
> sequence for the $(RECURSIVE_TARGETS) rule more than once when debugging
> the Makefile.am's in a big directory tree (namely TeX Live).  Typically
> I get a mysterious "*** failed", exit status 1, and there's no easy way
> to know which command failed.
> 
> I'd like to suggest that that initial silencing "@" become a variable,
> say RECURSIVE_TARGET_VERBOSE.  Of course the default would still be @,
> but then it could easily be overridden with, say, "set -vx;", to at least help
> narrow down the point of failure.

Try `make SHELL="/bin/bash -vx"', that should help for all rules that
use `@', not just the recursive ones.  I'd hate to add special hacks to
debug only some rules, should this not be sufficient for your purposes.

Cheers,
Ralf