Description

Our first attempt at automatic dependency tracking was based on the method recommended by GNU make. (see (make)Automatic Prerequisites section `Generating Prerequisites Automatically' in The GNU make Manual)

This version worked by precomputing dependencies ahead of time. For each source file, it had a special ‘.P’ file that held the dependencies. There was a rule to generate a ‘.P’ file by invoking the compiler appropriately. All such ‘.P’ files were included by the ‘Makefile’, thus implicitly becoming dependencies of ‘Makefile’.