RE: how can gnu make return 2 and not show any errors?

[Paul Smith]

It's best to hold these discussions on the mailing list, not in private.
That way you get the benefit of others' experience rather than relying
only on one person.

On Tue, 2009-10-20 at 10:01 -0700, Mark Galeck (CW) wrote:
> Wait, am I sure there are no rules that make could try to build the
> missing makefiles under -include??  Hmm, could this be causing that -
> if the rules are there, and make tries them and they fail, with
> -include all of that should be ignored and return 0, am I right or
> wrong?

They will be ignored during the include, but later on when make wants to
build them again as part of the "normal" build it will realize that they
failed (but it won't print the message because it thinks someone else
did already) and exit with an error code.  At least that's the way I
remember this bug.

As noted on the list, this problem has already been fixed in the current
CVS.  There will be a candidate for the next release of GNU make out
within the week, I expect; if you like you can test that (or you can
build from CVS if you have the appropriate tools such as automake,
autoconf, etc. installed).