When make goes wrong...

pickarooney

When configure gives no errors or warnings, and make spits out incomprehenseible (to me at least)errors, what do people normally do to try find out what's wrong? What kind of logfiles should I be looking at?

nadir

not trying to be smart, but man make

-d Print debugging information in addition to normal processing. The debugging information says which files are being considered for remaking, which file-times are being compared and with what results, which files actually need to be remade, which implicit rules are considered and which are applied---everything interesting about how make decides what to do.

also check online on forums and stuff, or if totally stuck go to irc. I use gentoo, so I go to forums.gentoo.org and search for the relevant information there. As for actual log files, im not sure about that, I havnt come across anything relevent in /var/log related to debugging compiles apart from distro-package management logs, but that doesn't cover makes. There could well be such software available though.

pickarooney

The -d switch just prints out ten times as much info at lightning speed, and I'll be damned if I'm going to print an hour's worth of scribbles to a text file and wade through it trying to pick out something meaningful!

pickarooney

Good Lord, I tried to compile gimp and seem to have accidentally got mixed up with Marc Dutroux!

Got a SIGCHLD; 1 unreaped children.
Reaping losing child 0x0807f308 PID 18768
make: *** [all] Error 2
Removing child 0x0807f308 PID 18768 from chain.

leeroybrown

Automake configure scripts normally write out a debug log (I think it's called either config.log or config.out). If you look in this you should be able to see exactly what failed and when.

pickarooney

The configure stage goes fine, though, no errors or warnings, it's just the make stage that screws up, and I can't find a relevant log file for it.