.INIT and Hidden Dependencies

The problem with both of these approaches is that the first make in the local directory might fail due to a random condition in some other (include) directory. This might entail forcing someone to monitor a (first) build. To avoid this, you can use the .INIT target to retrieve known hidden dependencies files from SCCS. .INIT is a special target that, along with its dependencies, is built at the start of the make run. To be sure that hidden.h is present, you could add the following line to your makefile

.INIT:     hidden.h