ok - then the misunderstanding is mine. Just wanted to make clear though that the --profile option in --remake is about build times, not about profiling the build software remake in isolation.

There may be a misunderstanding here. While the profiling is done totally inside the remake, what it is profiling is the build time itself. Let's not get into yet another tangent on what you think of the GNU/Linux Kernel size and how it should have been done.

Just accept that there are programs that are big and complex (compilers, and web browsers are often like this too), and take a lot of time to build from source. Profiling in the build system is just offering a window into how long the components take to build.

In the context of say the GNU/Linux Kernel, it might be helpful in deciding which modules should be built by default, for example.

I see that I can't make corrections to my post above, so I'll note here that there are some typos here: The first link should have gone to the bash debugger, not slashdot. "Nake" -> "Make"; "when a Makefile is found" -> "when a Makefile is not found"

Many thanks to editorDavid who greatly improved this and to slashdot for posting.

I knew when I submitted this that I'd get a lot of negative comments.

As someone who has spent a large part of his career working on tools to improve programming environments, I have been hounded by Enrinyes for doing such things. There are two furies: "You shouldn't use" and "Why are you wasting your time on."

A long, long time ago, before DevOps and when Systems Administrators were in great demand, I encountered the "You shouldn't use" fury when I asked about some different behavior of the Python debugger. A high-ranking chat poster told me that I shouldn't do any debugging. In all of his years of Python coding as a contractor he had never needed a debugger.

He lived in another world: he mostly wrote code and apparently didn't have to deal with anyone else's code.

The world I lived in was as a Systems Administrator in the trenches. We had lots of buggy code that we didn't write, and there was no documentation and no tests. Yet we were expected to make sure it ran okay. In this world, if you couldn't catch the applications programmer's fault, it was your own.

I don't want to get into a flame war over build systems. I use different build systems, too, depending on the context. In fact, the --tasks option in remake comes directly from rake . The most recent version added an option to scan parent directories when a Makefile is found in the current directory. That too comes from ideas in other programming environments.

If you are starting a project, use whatever you think best, whether GNU Make or not. As the title pegs this specifically to GNU/Linux Kernel builds, rather than waste your time here with the small stuff, take this up with the GNU/Linux Kernel builders. I think, though, that there are a number of people for whatever reason who will have to build the GNU/Linux Kernel and may run into a problem. For them, since remake aims to be compatible with GNU Nake (it just has additional options which are invalid in GNU Make), it might help them understand what's going on or help them debug a problem.