Re: notes about make docs p 3.5

[Martin Dorey]

> It'l be very good to have some examples with explanations in the docs.

Maybe so.  Concrete suggestions are easy to discuss, like:

> 1) make starts with a clean slate-> make starts with a clean sTate

The "clean slate" idiom seems more natural to this native English speaker.  Would "starts from scratch" present the same problem?

> In this discussion, the man says that this is no longer relevant.

Perhaps we could agree that SCCS and RCS are now a minority interest.  It does seem unlikely that other systems will get similar support added to the default rules, in which case the documentation could mention SCCS and RCS specifically without becoming a maintenance burden.  Reading the original discussion, though, perhaps the more useful clarification would have been to make it explicit that Make has default, built-in make rules, the ones from https://www.gnu.org/software/make/manual/make.html#Catalogue-of-Rules.

---

From: Bug-make <bug-make-bounces+martin.dorey=hds.com@gnu.org> on behalf of Dmitry <dmitry1976@gmail.com>
Sent: Monday, November 30, 2020 09:51
To: bug-make@gnu.org <bug-make@gnu.org>
Subject: notes about make docs p 3.5

 

***** EXTERNAL EMAIL *****

Hello, I'm reading GNU make docs and had troubles with understanding
paragraph 3.5 .
These are some problems which I encountered:

1) make starts with a clean slate-> make starts with a clean sTate

2) It was difficult to understand how make remade makefiles without examples.
There is discussion when peoples explain me what's going on.
It'l be very good to have some examples with explanations in the docs.

https://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url="">

3) It's absolutely unclear  this clause

> If you do not specify any makefiles to be read with ‘-f’ or ‘--file’ options, make will try the default makefile names; see What Name to Give Your Makefile. Unlike makefiles explicitly requested with ‘-f’ or ‘--file’ options, make is not certain that these makefiles should exist. However, if a default makefile does not exist but can be created by running make rules, you probably want the rules to be run so that the makefile can be used.

In this discussion, the man says that this is no longer relevant.
Perhaps it must be deleted or some explanations must be added.

https://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url="">

Respect,
--
  Dmitry