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Idea: Allow certain special targets as dependencies
From: |
David A. Wheeler |
Subject: |
Idea: Allow certain special targets as dependencies |
Date: |
Sun, 09 Jun 2019 18:46:24 -0400 (EDT) |
Idea: Allow certain special targets as dependencies
Problem:
It's often the case that a target also needs to be a special target. E.g.:
.PHONY: all
all: do-this do-that
Obviously this *works*, but it consumes many extra lines &
requires duplication of target names. For example,
if you misspell the "duplicated" names bad things happen.
For short makefiles this isn't a big deal, but with lots of rules
it gets annoying.
Solution:
As syntactic sugar,
I'd like to see selected special targets allowed as dependencies.
When this happens, it's the same thing as if the target was listed
as a dependency of the special target. E.g., you could express
the same thing above as:
all: .PHONY do-this do-that
This doesn't add new *functionality* to a makefile, but if you're
creating a GNU make specific makefile anyway the savings of
lines can be significant. It also eliminates a source of errors.
I propose that this abbreviation with the following special targets:
.PHONY
.PRECIOUS
.INTERMEDIATE
.SECONDARY
.IGNORE
.SILENT
.NOTPARALLEL
.ONESHELL
--- David A. Wheeler
- Idea: Allow certain special targets as dependencies,
David A. Wheeler <=