Prevent make from building Musescore from scratch after interruption

I'm building Musescore 3 on my netbook on Xubuntu because it's a 32 bit machine and there is no Musescore 3 AppImage available for 32 bit Linux.

However if the build gets interrupted, for instance due to a missing dependency, and I want to restart the build, it always starts from scratch. This is frustrating because the compilation takes several hours, especially with a slow machine.

In the compile instructions it says that 'make' is clever and it will only get the compiler to compile the new files; unchanged files and files where no dependency has changed will not be recompiled, so it should be much faster than the initial compile.

However this hasn't been my experience thus far. Is this a bug or do I need to do something different?
Thanks