Re: [bug #61226] A regression prevents generation of missing included dependency files.

[Paul Smith]

On Mon, 2021-10-25 at 10:11 +0000, Edward Welbourne wrote:
> Dmitry Goncharov (17 October 2021 18:33) wrote:
> > i think, make should not print a warning when a .d file is missing.
> > make should proceed and create the missing file. However, when .d
> > is present, but make cannot include it, then make should print an
> > error and stop.
> ...
> 
> Surely that would solve your problem, without invasive surgery in GNU
> make, or special-case handling of .d files anywhere but your make
> file ?

Two points:

First for Eddy's response: the issue we are thinking about isn't how
one person could rewrite makefiles to work differently: the issue is
that a somewhat serious backward compatibility break has been
introduced that could break thousands of makefiles, and we have to
resolve that before the next release.

Second for Britton's response: as far as I can tell no one is
suggesting that make would check the name of an included file and if it
ended in ".d" make would behave differently in some way than if it were
named ".od" or whatever.  Certainly I hope we all agree that kind of
check is not appropriate.  If you check his patch you'll see the change
Dmitry proposed was different: it didn't check the name of the target,
it checked to see if the recipe of the target was empty.  That is, it
would distinguish between this:

   include foo.xx
   foo.xx:

and this:

   include foo.xx
   foo.xx: ; : nothing

In both cases "foo.xx" is not created but (with Dmitry's change) the
first case would not give an error while the second one would give an
error, because it has a recipe.

The _name_ of the target is irrelevant.