>One thing I have manually hacked into make on occasion is to run sh -x instead
>of sh when debugging particularly messy makefiles.  It would be kinda neat if
>a debug option to make could be added to do something like this.

Yes, though that might be a bit of a sledge hammer?

I've used something like ${SHELL_TRACE:Dset -x;} at the start of said 
hairy bits of Makefiles, and then one can do "make SHELL_TRACE=yes" 
to get sh -x output.

You can use any number of such variables to be able to selectively turn
on tracing in various parts.  

I also find say DEBUG_ECHO?=:, then you can just put
@${DEBUG_ECHO} this is debug info .TARGET=${.TARGET} etc
in the scipt and use "make DEBUG_ECHO=echo" to turn it on.

--sjg