Follow-up Comment #5, bug #61226 (project make): > When you say the special behavior do you mean the section "Rules without Recipes or Prerequisites"?
exactly > 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. There is a difference between the implementation and the text in the manual. Given that the implementation is bound by backward compatibility, i think the text needs to be updated. Even though, this may not be what the original authors intended. There is also this statement in "3.3 Including Other Makefiles" "...after it has tried to find a way to remake a makefile and failed, will make diagnose the missing makefile as a fatal error. " This statement says a missing makefile is a fatal error, regardless of whether the rule returned success. Looks like this part of the manual needs to be updated too. > My current thinking on this is we should revert this part of the fix, but leave the original part. Do you mean keep the change in remake.c? > 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. i am attaching another patch with a warning. If this patch is good, then we'll need to update the tests. This warning in the attached patch is quite verbose, because it is printed for every missing .d file. _______________________________________________________ Reply to this item at: <https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?61226> _______________________________________________ Message sent via Savannah https://savannah.gnu.org/