Hi Branden, On Fri, Nov 28, 2025 at 03:30:12PM -0600, G. Branden Robinson wrote: > If a dependency is missing, that should smoke it out. You can see that > make(1) thought that no dependencies needed to be built first.
This matches my hypothesis. > If I run find(1) before that "make V=1 -C build" command, I see the > following: > > $ find ./build/src/devices/xditview/ > ./build/src/devices/xditview/ > ./build/src/devices/xditview/.deps > ./build/src/devices/xditview/.deps/gxditview-device.Po > ./build/src/devices/xditview/.deps/gxditview-parse.Po > ./build/src/devices/xditview/.deps/gxditview-lex.Po > ./build/src/devices/xditview/.deps/gxditview-font.Po > ./build/src/devices/xditview/.deps/gxditview-Dvi.Po > ./build/src/devices/xditview/.deps/gxditview-xditview.Po > ./build/src/devices/xditview/.deps/gxditview-draw.Po > ./build/src/devices/xditview/.deps/gxditview-page.Po I saw nothing in my build logs that would have created these files. > So the directory _does_ already exist, by dint of GNU Automake's > dependency generation system (which I do not pretend to understand).[2] > > Is your rebuild somehow using "--disable-dependency-tracking"? This option is passed by debhelper by default. The answer is "yes". > I expect it would be harmless to add an idempotent directory creation > with "mkdir -p" to this target rule anyway, but I'd prefer to see a > root-cause analysis of this problem first in case there is a more > insidious one afoot. I think you nailed it yourself by pointing at --disable-dependency-tracking. Helmut
