The Remake Debugger¶
When there problems in running GNU make, most of the time I can figure out what’s wrong by switching to remake and looking at its call stack and extended error information.
When that is not sufficient, the --trace or -x option many times will fill in the gaps.
However there are situations when it is helpful to go deeper. So here and there is a full-fledged debugger built into remake.
remake can do four main kinds of things (plus other things in support of these) to help you catch bugs in the act:
- examine and query things: See the state of variables, see how they got expanded, where targets are defined, and look a the the state of targets
- stop at specified places such as targets, or when there is an error. In conjunction with this you can:
- change the internal state of things as though the Makefile were written differently
- experiment with Makefile code fragments possibly correcting the effects of one bug and go on to discover another.
Although you can use the remake debugger to debug Makefiles, it can also be used just as a front-end for learning more about Makefiles and
how GNU make or remake processes a Makefile.
Contents:
- Entering the Debugger
- Sample Debugger Sessions
- Debugger Command Syntax
- Debugger Commands
- Breakpoints (break, delete)
- Examining data (print, target, expand, write)
- Specifying and examining files (edit, list, load)
- Information from the Debugged Session (break, files, line, program, rules, target, targets, tasks, variables)
- Interfacing to the OS (cd, pwd, shell)
- Run-Changing Commands (continue, finish, next, quit, run, skip, step)
- Set (basename, debug, ignore-errors, keep-going, setq, setqx, silent)
- Show (args, basename, commands, debug, ignore-errors, keep-going, silent, version)
- Examining the Target Stack (backtrace, frame, up, down)
- Debugger Support Commands (help, source)