Follow-up Comment #4, bug #61226 (project make): When you say the special behavior do you mean the section "Rules without Recipes or Prerequisites"?
I think that text is a little misleading. There's actually nothing magical about having no recipe or an empty recipe here, as best as I can remember. Make doesn't check for this. Even if you provide a recipe for a force target it will still behave the same as it would without a recipe, as long as the recipe doesn't actually create the force target. So, I think the change to fail includes if the target doesn't actually build them, only if it has a recipe, is too large of a backward-compatibility break to consider for now. My current thinking on this is we should revert this part of the fix, but leave the original part. Maybe the thing to do is, if we detect this situation we can emit a warning message that users should change their makefiles to use "-include" instead of "include" which would avoid that warning. Then in a few releases we could put back this change where make would fail if included files weren't built. _______________________________________________________ Reply to this item at: <https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?61226> _______________________________________________ Message sent via Savannah https://savannah.gnu.org/