Problem: Make generates empty command

[Kate Ebneter]

Howdy, folks,

I have a very strange problem and am hoping someone might be able to 
suggest at least a way to attack it.

We build our software with ARM's proprietary compilers and assemblers 
under Windows. Awhile back it was decided to stop using CodeWarrior and 
switch to a make-based system using GNU Make under cygwin, and the 
various projects were converted into makefiles. There's nothing 
particularly strange about the makefiles that I can see.

Most of the time, everything is fine, but occasionally, on our 
continuous build system, we start getting errors where it appears that 
Make has called armcpp (the ARM compiler) or armasm with a blank 
command line. It happens at random places during the build, does not 
appear to be related to anything like time since last reboot (I've seen 
it happen immediately after rebooting the machine), and spontaneously 
disappears, that is, it may happen for one, two, or a dozen commands in 
a row, and then stop, with Make happily continuing on.

I know that cygwin's Make is not identical to the official GNU Make, 
but an examination of the diffs was unenlightening. Does anyone have 
any idea why Make might output a blank command, even though the same 
command executes fine on other occasions? I'm about to tear my hair out 
here...

I can provide some snippets of the makefile in question if you think 
that will help. The rules seem quite straightforward, however.

Thanks,
Kate Ebneter
Build Engineer
Apple Computer, Inc.