Why is makefile exhibiting non-deterministic behaviour? - makefile

Question

I have a makefile that is trying to do the following: identify all files under the current directory (all sub-directories included) with .c and .s extensions, for each one compile a non-linked object file and put it into a directory. All C files end up in objects/c, all assembly files end up in objects/ass.
The makefile always works as expected on the first execution (all commands are called in the right order) and no errors are produced.
However if I call make again, half of the time i get "nothing to be done for 'all'.". Which is what you would expect, since no files have been modified. But the other half of the time, make is selecting a random assembly file and compiling that file. That is to say,if I keep doing "make" I sometimes compile file1.s sometimes file2.s. and it keeps randomly swapping between the assembly files add infinitum (it never reaches a "nothing to be done") state.
How is make exhibitting non deterministic behaviour?
This is the smallest makefile I could make that reproduces the error:
SRC_C = $(wildcard *.c) $(wildcard **/*.c)
SRC_ASS = $(wildcard *.s) $(wildcard **/*.s)
OBJECTS_C = $(addprefix $(OBJECT_DIR)c/, $(notdir $(SRC_C:.c=.o)))
OBJECTS_ASS = $(addprefix $(OBJECT_DIR)ass/, $(notdir $(SRC_ASS:.s=.o)))
OBJECTS = $(OBJECTS_C) $(OBJECTS_ASS)
OBJECT_DIR = objects/
all: $(OBJECTS)
%/:
mkdir $#
$(OBJECTS_C): $(OBJECT_DIR) $(OBJECT_DIR)c/
arm-none-eabi-gcc -O0 -march=armv8-a $(wildcard */$(#F:.o=.c)) -nostartfiles -c -o $#
$(OBJECTS_ASS): $(OBJECT_DIR) $(OBJECT_DIR)ass/
arm-none-eabi-as -march=armv8-a $(wildcard */$(#F:.o=.s)) -c -o $#
.PHONY: clean
clean:
rm -rf $(OBJECT_DIR)

Answer 1

You have many errors here.
The biggest is a conceptual one: By flattening all your object files into one directory, there's no way to express proper dependencies using pattern rules, so your object files do not really depend on their respective source files. I'd say: just don't do that! Having object directories is fine, but they should mirror the directory structure of the source tree.
Further errors:
directly depending on directories. This will not work as expected, directories should always be order-only dependencies, as already stated in the comments
Make doesn't support recursive wildcards -- if you really need that, you could write your own function or, assuming you're always building on *nix, just call find instead
Pattern rules for creating directories are not the best idea either -- I'd suggest to collect all needed directories in a variable and loop over that.
Stylistic improvements:
Assign variables that don't need deferred evaluation with :=
Assign variables influencing the build process with ?=, so the user can override them at the command line
Use "standard" variables like CC, AS, CROSS_COMPILE
declare all phony targets in .PHONY.
Your Makefile with these changes applied would look like this:
OBJECT_DIR ?= objects
C_OBJECT_DIR ?= $(OBJECT_DIR)/c
AS_OBJECT_DIR ?= $(OBJECT_DIR)/ass
SRC_C:= $(shell find -name \*.c)
SRC_ASS:= $(shell find -name \*.s)
OBJECTS_C:= $(addprefix $(C_OBJECT_DIR)/, $(SRC_C:.c=.o))
OBJECTS_ASS:= $(addprefix $(AS_OBJECT_DIR)/, $(SRC_ASS:.s=.o))
OBJECTS:= $(OBJECTS_C) $(OBJECTS_ASS)
OUTDIRS:= $(sort $(dir $(OBJECTS)))
CROSS_COMPILE ?= arm-none-eabi-
CC ?= gcc
AS ?= as
CFLAGS ?= -O0 -march=armv8-a -nostartfiles
ASFLAGS ?= -march=armv8-a
all: $(OBJECTS)
$(OUTDIRS):
$(foreach _dir,$#,mkdir -p $(_dir);)
$(C_OBJECT_DIR)/%.o: %.c | $(OUTDIRS)
$(CROSS_COMPILE)$(CC) -c -o $# $(CFLAGS) $<
$(AS_OBJECT_DIR)/%.o: %.s | $(OUTDIRS)
$(CROSS_COMPILE)$(AS) -c -o $# $(ASFLAGS) $<
clean:
rm -rf $(OBJECT_DIR)
.PHONY: all clean
Note there is one important thing missing: automatic dependencies. With this Makefile, each object file depends on its respective source file, but completely misses any headers included. For anything other than a simple toy, you should add that, google for "gnu make gcc automatic dependencies" or something similar (not the scope of this question).