Twas brillig at 20:32:20 21.11.2009 UTC+00 when chris@chris-wilson.co.uk did gyre and gimble:

 CW> Use the facilities of GNU make to create a magic function that will
 CW> on the first invocation print a description of how to enable
 CW> verbose compile lines and then print the quiet rule.

Uhm. Now it eats much less :)

$ make
...
  GZIP	notmuch.1.gz
/bin/sh: --rsyncable: not found
make: *** [notmuch.1.gz] Error 127
$

$ make V=1
...
rsyncable --stdout notmuch.1 > notmuch.1.gz
/bin/sh: rsyncable: not found
make: [notmuch.1.gz] Error 127 (ignored)
$

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