Hello Bob, * Bob Walters wrote on Wed, Jun 18, 2008 at 07:05:05AM CEST: > On Jun 17, 2008, at 9:13 PM, Ralf Wildenhues wrote: > >>> It looks as if the "($LN_S) $? ." command is failing. >> >> Can you show how exactly they fail? Remove the @ preceding the >> commands and the 2>/dev/null to see what happens, and post the output >> of the failure, please. > > I removed the two bits/gslice links, and the stamp-bits file as an > experiment. > Switched back to the std Makefile (with $?) > > make showed: > > mkdir -p ./bits > cd ./bits && ln -s /Users/bobw/Desktop/gcc.svn/gcc/libstdc++-v3/ > include/bits/basic_string.h /Users/bobw/Desktop/gcc.svn/gcc/libstdc++- > v3/include/bits/cpp_type_traits.h /Users/bobw/Desktop/gcc.svn/gcc/ > libstdc++-v3/include/bits/deque.tcc /Users/bobw/Desktop/gcc.svn/gcc/ > libstdc++-v3/include/bits/fstream.tcc /Users/bobw/Desktop/gcc.svn/gcc/ > libstdc++-v3/include/bits/stl_deque.h /Users/bobw/Desktop/gcc.svn/gcc/ [...] > libstdc++-v3/include/bits/vector.tcc . > ln: ./basic_string.h: File exists [...] > make: [stamp-bits] Error 1 (ignored) > > Everything above looks right, except that the two gslice headers are not > in $? argument list, as you can see. I confirmed that they are in > ${bits_headers}, and the files exist in the source dirs. Changing the > $? argument in the make to ${bit_headers} results in a much longer > command containing all the source files in ${bit_headers} producing the > correct links. That's weird, though. $? lists all prerequisites that are newer than the target, in this case stamp-bits. If the target does not exist, $? should list all prerequisites. Please check whether your Apple-built make 3.81 has patches compared to upstream. FWIW, I tried 3.79, 3.79.1, 3.80, and 3.81, on i686-pc-linux-gnu, and all of them worked with the experiment you described above. Done to exclude that this bug which looks related: <http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?16051> isn't the cause. Does make perchance find a stray stamp-bits file in a VPATH search (that may come from, say, an earlier, non-VPATH build)? You can use make -d stamp-bits in order to find out. Thanks, Ralf