I believe I understand. The name "order-only" is highly misleading and should be changed - it does considerably more than "only" "order"; the only thing it does not do is check the timestamp. This portion of the documentation *particularly* needs changing: > Occasionally, however, you have a situation where you want to impose > a specific ordering on the rules to be invoked without forcing the > target to be updated if one of those rules is executed. In that case, > you want to define order-only prerequisites. The natural reading of this strongly implies that an order-only prerequisite literally only affects the order of things. I would suggest > Occasionally, however, you have a situation where you do not want to > force the target to be updated if a rule is executed, but you do want to > ensure that rule is executed before the target every time the target is > built. In that case, you want to define order-only prerequisites.
Thanks, Jacob On Tue, May 17, 2022 at 3:40 PM Paul Smith <psm...@gnu.org> wrote: > On Tue, 2022-05-17 at 22:32 +0000, Martin Dorey wrote: > > > all your targets are .PHONY, and thus are always rebuilt anyway > > > > If you "make down", the rule for "down-clean" doesn't run. They're > > only rebuilt if something causes them to be considered. > > > > > order-only prerequisites are totally irrelevant and have no impact > > > on > > > your makefile. > > > > If you comment-out the order-only prerequisite that says that the up > > target depends on down-clean, then the recipe for down-clean doesn't > > get run when you "make up". > > Sure, of course. > > What I was trying to say was, any rule that would normally be run will > be run regardless of order-only or not, because all the targets in the > makefile are phony. So adding or removing the order-only operator in a > prerequisites list makes no difference to how the targets will be > processed, in this specific makefile. >
