No one wants to manually do dependency management in even a moderately sized project. I really haven't found an ideal way to have these -MM -MT flags integrated into Makefiles; I've tried having an awk script automatically modify the Makefile as the build is happening, but of course the updated dependencies will only work for later builds, so it's only good for updating the dependencies. Any other approaches HNers used and really liked?
I wrote a blog post to show how to integrate dependency output for both dependency and non-existence dependency generation [2]. The game “Liberation Circuit” can be built with my redo implementation; you can output a dependency graph usable with Graphviz [4] using “redo-dot”.
There is only one other redo implementation that I would recommend, the one from Jonathan de Boyne Pollard [5], who rightly notices that compilers should output information about non-existence dependencies [6].
I would not recommend the redo implementation from Avery Pennarun [7], which is often referenced (and introduced me to the concept), mainly because it is not implemented well: It manages to be both larger and slower than my shell script implementation, yet the documentation says this about the sqlite dependency (classic case of premature optimization):
> I don't think we can reach the performance we want with dependency/build/lock information stored in plain text files
[1] http://news.dieweltistgarnichtso.net/bin/redo-sh.html
[2] http://news.dieweltistgarnichtso.net/posts/redo-gcc-automati...
[3] https://github.com/linleyh/liberation-circuit
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphviz
[5] http://jdebp.eu./Softwares/redo/
[6] http://jdebp.eu./FGA/introduction-to-redo.html#CompilerDefic...