Re: Making makefiles with primarily phony targets more friendly

[Edward Welbourne]

On Wed, 2022-08-10 at 19:08 +0000, Katherine Pata wrote:
>> Something like --reverse-phony or a variable like .GENUINE or .REAL
>> that is mutually exclusive with .PHONY would be really helpful.

Paul Smith (11 August 2022 21:49) replied:
> Adding such a command-line option is not right, ...
[snip]
> Whether or not specific targets are phony is intrinsic to the
> makefile, not based on the invocation of make.

Indeed.
So this would be something in the make-file, e.g. a .MOSTLY_PHONY target
whose presence says rules are phony by default.

> I'm not sure I quite understand the suggestion; I think it would need
> to be fleshed out and made more detailed first.  How would a variable
> like .GENUINE or .REAL work?

When rules are phony by default, saying

.REAL: prerequisite

would declare the given prerequisite to *not* be phony,

        Eddy.