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Related: make obviously makes a big dependency graph to keep track of this stuff. Is there a good way to make it show this? How do you debug these kinds of constructions?

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Based on my experience of creating MakeMe (https://GitHub.com/OakNinja/MakeMeFish) I would say the only way of creating that graph would be to write a make clone with this feature. While make is an awesome tool, it really lacks good insights.

BSD make has lots of debugging options, so you can ask it to print the dependency graph amongst other things https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=make

If you use GNU make, check out remake http://bashdb.sourceforge.net/remake/ which is GNU make patched with debugging support

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