Makefile that calls other makefiles always out of date - makefile

Question

I've gone over a number of other posts about recursive makefiles. Either I'm doing something wrong or there's a missing feature that I want. With a typical makefile I can check to see if it's out of date with -q, for example:
make -q || echo "out of date"
However, setting up a mechanism to force make to process dependent makefiles causes the root makefile to always be out of date. Here's a working example:
#./Makefile
all: myfile
myfile: dir
cp dir/myfile .
.PHONY: dir
dir:
$(MAKE) -C dir/
#./dir/Makefile
all: myfile
myfile:
touch myfile
#testing...
>>> make
make -C dir/
make[1]: Entering directory `dir'
touch myfile
make[1]: Leaving directory `dir'
cp dir/myfile .
>>> make
make -C dir/
make[1]: Entering directory `dir'
make[1]: Nothing to be done for `all'.
make[1]: Leaving directory `dir'
cp dir/myfile . #<-- this shouldn't be necessary
>>> make -q || echo "out of date"
make -C dir/
out of date
Is there a mechanism that allows the recursive make call to return and say "actually everything's up to date here, no need to continue"?

Answer 1

There's an hacky way of doing it, maybe.
You could invoke $(MAKE) -q ... && touch something from inside the makefile, and have the something file as requisite for some rule in the outer makefile.

Answer 2

No, there's no way to do that. A recursive invocation of make is just another command that make invokes in a shell: the only result of that command available to make is the exit code. If we could always be sure that the command invoked was a make command, and that we were using the -q flag, then we could assume that if it exited with a 0 then nothing was done. But make does not assume those things.
You will need to rewrite your makefiles to be non-recursive to get the behavior you want.

Answer 3

#Dacav gave me the idea of calling make explicitly. Though without using a temporary files, target dependencies can be set dynamically using a shell-populated variable. I'm not sure the following is a good solution because even when calling make without -q it recursively calls make -q to populate OLD_CHILDREN. Moreover this will happen again unnecessarily for the child makefiles too (assuming multiple levels of recursion).
#./Makefile
CHILDREN=dir/
OLD_CHILDREN=$(foreach c, $(CHILDREN), $(shell make -q -C $(c) || echo $(c)))
all: myfile
myfile: $(OLD_CHILDREN)
cp dir/myfile .
.PHONY: $(CHILDREN)
$(CHILDREN):
$(MAKE) -C $#
Testing...
>>> make -q || echo out of date
make -C dir/
make: *** [dir/] Error 1 #huh??? whatever. still works, returning out of date
out of date
>>> make
make -C dir/
make[1]: Entering directory `dir'
touch myfile
make[1]: Leaving directory `dir'
cp dir/myfile .
>>> make
make: Nothing to be done for `all'.
>>> make -q || echo out of date
>>> #nothing. success :D