hidden dependencies

[Warlich, Christof]

Hi,

I had to write a new build system using GNU make only for a rather complex and 
big project which had a
really werid and unmaintainable build system nailed up from a bunch of perl 
scripts and a few makefiles.

As everything was almost finished now, I just gave GNU make's -j option a try. 
Doing so, I had to learn that I
obviously missed a dependency here and there, not causing issue so far as make 
generated everything in
a certain sequence that made everything availabe in time more or less by 
coincidence of doing things in the
right sequence.

While it is no problem to fix my build system to include these missing 
dependencies, I wonder that there may
still be more missing dependencies "under the hood", which may show up any 
time, e.g. whenever timing
changes during a parallel build of when rules are reordered.

My question: Is there a generic best practice approach to find all existing 
dependencies that are hidden
by a more or less arbitrary build sequence?

Thanks for any ideas,

Chris