Re: Making makefiles with primarily phony targets more friendly

[Alejandro Colomar]

Hi,

On 8/10/22 22:19, Jean-Baptiste Poittevin wrote:
> By using a lot of PHONY targets, I think you're closing a door to one 
> make greatest feature : not redoing those things that are already up to 
> date.
>
> If you consider that every rule can generate a useful file (file 
> containing container image for example) or a dummy file, you can benefit 
> from the date comparison between it and its pre-requisites and diminish 
> greatly the need for PHONY targets. In my opinion, PHONY targets should 
> just be used for comfort of the user launching make, and those targets 
> have simply a dependency to a real file.

Agree.  The Linux man-pages project has a lot of Makefile code for 
linting, and we use dummy files to benefit from make(1)'s date 
comparison.  You might want to have a look at the code:

<https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/docs/man-pages/man-pages.git/tree/>

Cheers,

Alex

> Le 10 août 2022 21:08:55 GMT+02:00, Katherine Pata <me@kitty.sh> a écrit :
>
>     I often find myself using makefiles to handle things like project
>     linting, container images, various scripts, initiating tests, and
>     other misc tasks. Sometimes these include tasks that have real
>     dependencies that make should keep track of, but often the vast
>     majority of targets are phony.
>
>     Something like --reverse-phony or a variable like .GENUINE or .REAL
>     that is mutually exclusive with .PHONY would be really helpful.
>
>     Would there be interest in developing this for GNU Make? If someone
>     creates a patch, would this be accepted?
>
>     Has this been discussed before?