phony | Tiny command line fake data generator | Generator Utils library

To fix the issue, you need to replace the comma with a space in $(TARGET): what,ever

The best way to make these applications would be to add instructions on compiling for each object or library you introduce

Such as adding files.o

This seems to be imprecisely documented. While MAKEFLAGS has the flags like e.g. -s and -k as ks in it, the -j flag gets processed in another way: it is not stripped of the leading dash - AND it is not visible in the first pass of processing the makefile. Only when rules are executed, MAKEFLAGS receives a value, albeit a processed form of the one you gave. -j3 elicits a -j3 --jobserver-auth=3,4 response from the command line transcriber of make, while -j stays -j. So what does this mean for us? Obviously the feature to detect the requested parallelism at runtime is not stable or there are some good reasons not to access them (which is the case most of the time when you encounter exceptional behaviour in GNU tools), so maybe you can give us more information on what you are trying to achieve - maybe there is a way to circumvent accessing the command line.

The call

If you look at the verbose output from the go build command, you will see that when compiling the directory as a complete go package, the main.c file is being included as part of the C code used in hello.go.

From the documentation:

When the Go tool sees that one or more Go files use the special import "C", it will look for other non-Go files in the directory and compile them as part of the Go package

The easiest solution here is to separate the main C and Go packages, so that they don't interfere with each other's build process. Testing this out, removing the main.c file will build libchello.a and libgohello.a, and then adding it back in will complete the build of main.

What am I doing wrong?

Although the Autotools support, with some caveats, recursing into directories where you provide pre-built makefiles, you cannot expect those pre-built makefiles to be able to rely on autotools-provided variables such as the standard directory variables bindir and sysconfdir. Thus, although it is allowed to rely on hand-written makefiles in subdirectories, this is probably a false trail for you.

I recommend going back to this:

If I create Makefile.am files in the sub-directories too, nothing seems to happen there

and working out what's wrong. The Autotools definitely support generating recursive build systems, and one Makefile.am per directory is part of the usual approach to that. If it didn't work for you then my first guess would be that you forgot to list the extra makefiles in your AC_CONFIG_FILES list.

As an alternative, just because you have multiple directories does not mean that you need to use recursive make. It is quite possible to build such a project with the support of a single makefile, and the Autotools can help with such a makefile.

A good proposal is to remove the @s in front of the command names to see what commands make is executing.... To make a program debuggable, you need to check that all the compilation steps are done using the -g flag and that the linking step has also included the -g flag. Also a good option is to specify no optimization so you will not get to problems with breakpoints you cannot fix because the compiler has eliminated or changed the final code, and has broken the correspondence between source lines and points in the code.

If you take off all the @s there, you will see the commands as make is executing them, think you don't see now. I think there's a command (berkeley make has it) to make make to print the commands even though the @s remain in place.

By the way, as you are telling you are using vscode it should be fine if you execute make on the command line alone, to see the output of the commands, and try to see if it is some problem with make or with vscode itself.

As you have not provided your complete project, I'm sorry to say that I can only test it with dumb/fake files and no program can be made to test it with gdb.

I guess that the problem is that you have put your project sources in a different directory than where the program is built, and the sources cannot be found by gdb and so, no source debugging can be done because gdb cannot find the source files. Gdb has some way to specify the path to the source files... You should look at gdb documentation.

The output means that make invoked this command:

The problem is that you're passing input to ani-cli via pipe, and when echo is done, the pipe closes, which closes ani-cli's standard input stream (stdin for short), which ani-cli detects as an error. Then there's no way to provide additional input.

Instead, pass the query as an argument (which the docs say you can do):

In your Makefile make sees that it needs all gv-files (SRC) to make one file: 1.gv (OUT) so in the loop the prerequisite changes $< but not the target $@.
You need to match a pattern and use patsubst instead of subst so OUT is a pattern of files.

I removed most variables for clarity. Feel free to add them back.