The 'clean' target is noticeably slow on cygwin, even for a 'do-nothing' invocation of 'make clean'. For example, the second 'make clean' below: $ make clean >/dev/null 2>&1 $ make clean GIT_VERSION = 2.29.0 ... make[1]: Entering directory '/home/ramsay/git/Documentation' GEN mergetools-list.made GEN cmd-list.made GEN doc.dep ... $ has been timed at 23.339s, using git v2.29.0, on my laptop (an old core i5-4200M @ 2.50GHz, 8GB RAM, 1TB HDD). Notice that, since the 'doc.dep' file does not exist, make takes the time (about 8s) to generate several files in order to create the doc.dep include file. (If an 'include' file is missing, but a target for the said file is present in the Makefile, make will execute that target and, if that file now exists, throw away all its internal data and re-read and re-parse the Makefile). Having spent the time to include the 'doc.dep' file, the 'clean' target immediately deletes those files. The document dependencies specified in the 'doc.dep' include file, expressed as make targets and prerequisites, do not affect what the 'clean' target removes. Therefore, the time spent in generating the dependencies is completely wasted effort. In order to eliminate such wasted effort, use the value of the internal $(MAKECMDGOALS) variable to only '-include doc.dep' when the target is not 'clean'. (This drops the time down to 12.364s, on my laptop, giving an improvement of 47.02%). Signed-off-by: Ramsay Jones <ramsay@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> --- Documentation/Makefile | 2 ++ 1 file changed, 2 insertions(+) diff --git a/Documentation/Makefile b/Documentation/Makefile index 80d1908a44..652d57a1b6 100644 --- a/Documentation/Makefile +++ b/Documentation/Makefile @@ -286,7 +286,9 @@ doc.dep : $(docdep_prereqs) $(wildcard *.txt) $(wildcard config/*.txt) build-doc $(PERL_PATH) ./build-docdep.perl >$@+ $(QUIET_STDERR) && \ mv $@+ $@ +ifneq ($(MAKECMDGOALS),clean) -include doc.dep +endif cmds_txt = cmds-ancillaryinterrogators.txt \ cmds-ancillarymanipulators.txt \ -- 2.29.0