Are there any good tools for examining Makefiles? [closed]

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Large complex make files can be daunting to read and examine. What tools are good for visualizing or otherwise examining a gnu make file?

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I tried to use CPAN's visualizer and failed. So, I've written my own quick-n-dirty Makefile visualizer.

You may want to try it: http://github.com/vak/makefile2dot

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There is a Perl library for building GraphViz figures from Makefiles:

https://metacpan.org/pod/GraphViz::Makefile

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I've had good success with the --print-data-base (-p) option.

Combined with --just-print (-n, --dry-run) and redirecting stdout to a file creates a new single makefile containing all the rules and variables in a generic format which you may find easier to understand.

With really bad makefiles I've gone as far as parsing this output in Perl to generate a new build system!

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I don't know of a tool that can make sense of a set of makefiles. It may indeed be nearly impossible to create one as most large make based build environments are a hodge-podge of random commands, frightening macro substitution, and hugely context dependent control flow.

As an aside, I hear good things about SCons which I'm looking at because I'm involved with a system make environment which has become a maintenance nightmare in its own right.