If I had a nickel for every time I have seen a Makefile straight up copied from other projects and modified to "work" while leaving completely unrelated unnecessary build steps and targets in place.
It's a major pet peeve of mine.
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It's a major pet peeve of mine.
Trial and error?
Well have fun with that :p
If you don’t have enough time, write down whatever pieces you understood, and write down what parts “seem to work, but you don’t understand“ to help make progress towards better documentation.
If you put the documentation as comments into the file, this can make copy&pasting working examples into a reasonably solid process.