include and reparsing Makefile

[Warlich, Christof]

Hi,

I'm seeing a rather unexpected behaviour when including a submakefile. Please 
consider the following Makefile:

nothing:
reparse.mk: mayOrMayNotExist ; @echo would remake $@
-include reparse.mk

When I call make while the file mayOrMayNotExist does exist, I get:

$ touch mayOrMayNotExist
$ make
would remake reparse.mk
make: Nothing to be done for `nothing'

But when the file mayOrMayNotExist  does _not_ exist, I only get

$ rm -f mayOrMayNotExist
$ make
make: Nothing to be done for `nothing'.

Could anyone help me in understanding why Make behaves differently here?

Cheers,

Chris