Re: GNU Make bug report: broken dry-run functionality with sub-make invocations

[David A. Wheeler]

> On Mar 18, 2022, at 3:19 AM, Ambrus Sumegi <Ambrus.Sumegi@arm.com> wrote:
> 
> Thanks a lot for your suggestions, Martin and Paul. I understand the 
> reasoning behind why Make cannot improve this behavior, and the conditional 
> execution of tee that you both proposed looks like a concise and elegant 
> solution to my problem. My only remaining concern is about the man page, 
> which currently has this rather vague description of the switch in question:
> 
>       -n, --just-print, --dry-run, --recon
>               Print the commands that would be executed, but do not execute 
> them (except in certain circumstances).
> 
> Perhaps the "(except in certain circumstances)" could be expanded to 
> something like "If the line contains a call to $(MAKE), the entire line will 
> still be executed, with the -n option passed to the sub-make instance. Be 
> prepared for side effects of output redirection."

+1 to this. Proposal:

 Print the commands that would be executed, but do not execute them in most 
cases.
Note: If the line contains a call to $(MAKE), the entire line will still be 
executed, with the -n option passed to the sub-make instance that is run.
 Also, be prepared for side effects of output redirection.

(If someone has a better way to write that last sentence, please do so.)

It's a pretty important exception, so it should be explicitly described in the 
summary.

--- David A. Wheeler