On Fri, 2026-02-06 at 19:10 +0100, Peter Dyballa wrote: > What can be the cause of this behaviour on these old Macs? On my > recent Mac, intel x86_64-apple-darwin23, the system's GNU Make 3.81 > and GNU Make 4.4.1, maintained with the MacPorts package manager, > both produce all six symlinks at once: > ... > > What can be done to make the Makefile do its jobs? How can I examine > make and gmake?
First, you should ignore the native MacOS version of GNU Make. Not only is this a very old version (due to Apple's refusal to provide any GPLv3 software, they will never be able to ship a newer version of GNU Make than 3.81) but the last time I was involved with investigating issues in that version the conclusion was that Apple had applied extra patches to the code which caused incorrect behavior. However, the MacPorts build of GNU Make 4.4.1 should work. If the result is reproducible I recommend you run the build with the debug (-d) option and capture the output. For large builds this output will be quite voluminous... be sure you have appropriate disk space. Then, look through the output file for references to one of the symlink targets which are not being built and see what GNU Make has to say about it and why its recipe was not invoked.
