Hi, Recent versions of automake add an option --disable-dependency-tracking to the generated configure script. If you don't use that option, the generated Makefile will wrap all calls to the compiler in a call to 'depcomp', which will generate a Makefile snippet in a .deps directory to better track dependencies. This would include dependencies in the to be built package, but also dependencies outside that package, e.g., system headers.
While I can understand the value of this for an upstream developer, I
would wonder whether this is of any value for Debian packages. Debian
packages typically do not profit from this kind of optimization; after
all, a call to 'dpkg-buildpackage' will start off by running a 'make
clean', which means that all source files are (unconditionally) rebuilt
anyway.
Is there any other reason why we would still need to use automake's
dependency tracking anyway?
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