Re: order-only prerequisites don't behave as I'd have expected after reading the documentation

[Philip Guenther]

On Mon, Jun 11, 2012 at 9:40 AM, Stefano Lattarini
<address@hidden> wrote:
> The GNU make 3.82 manual reads:
>
>    Normally, this is exactly what you want: if a target's prerequisite
>    is updated, then the target should also be updated.
>
>    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.
>
> But if I write a makefile like this:
>
>    ALL = a b c d
>    default:
>        echo Specify a target: $(ALL); exit 1
>    .PHONY: $(ALL)

What is your intent for declaring all the targets PHONY in this Makefile?

(Note: to quote 4.6 Phony Targets:
    A phony target should not be a prerequisite of a real target file;
    if it is, its recipe will be run every time `make' goes to update that
    file.  As long as a phony target is never a prerequisite of a real
    target, the phony target recipe will be executed only when the phony
    target is a specified goal (*note Arguments to Specify the Goals:
    Goals.).
)


Philip Guenther