Paul D. Smith writes: > Hi; I'm certainly not adverse to changing the wording to be more clear, > but I'd like to understand what you mean first. > > You say "[Bruno] also observed that in "force" targets this is usually > the situation" ... I didn't understand that comment?
I'm not sure, but here is one possibility. Let's say I'm using automake. I could add something like this to the end ifdef FORCE $($(bin_PROGRAMS)_OBJECTS): force endif and this would have all objects and binaries to get remade if I run setting FORCE (e.g. "make FORCE=1") no matter how I change the Makefile otherwise. > Second, you discuss using .PHONY targets "where one tracing, profiling, > or debugging code working by instrumenting/augmenting the Makefile"; I > don't follow that either. A mark of .PHONY is transitive: by that I > mean that if you mark a target as .PHONY then all the targets that > depend on that target are ALSO implicitly .PHONY; they will always be > rebuilt. > > So, I don't see how it can be used for temporary measures like debugging > or tracing...? Unless you mean editing the file to turn on/off the > .PHONY-ness; but in that case wouldn't it be simpler to just use -W or > similar? You are right, this doesn't make any sense. Whatever I was thinking was wrong. My bad. That said, the point remains that when one has a feature or mechanism others will find ways to use it -- sometimes in ways that weren't considered initially. It may be an okay as a rule of thumb thing that phony targets are generally not prerequisites of real target files. But to suggest they "should not be" may be a bit too strong. There may be times when such as that given above where this is *exactly* what is desired. _______________________________________________ Help-make mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/help-make
