Q: Is there an option to build Emacs without byte-compiling the Lisp files?
BACKGROUND: The length of time needed to build Emacs makes debugging / developing an extremely slow process. For example, the latest bug that I am working on debugging came about on 11/19/2016. Performing a git hard reset to try out a variety of commits over a long period of time requires a fresh start to avoid certain errors that I encountered.
SUBDIR="lib lib-src src" make, but I didn't test it. The idea is that in this way you'd reset the variable which lists all subdirectories that need to be built recursively, and this is the variable that's responsible for Make looking intolispsubdirectory. However, in the Makefile it's re-defined, and I'm not sure if environment variable will override it (probably not), in which case you'll have to edit its definition in the Makefile.