Re: [O] Reloading uncompiled and testing from several git branches

[François Pinard]

Achim Gratz <address@hidden> writes:

> .PHONY: testclean # in case you'll ever have a file named "testclean"

> testclean:      test clean

> In general all such targets that are simple combinations of existing
> teargets can be added that way.

Allow me a pedantic nit-pick, yet nothing so important in practice
nowadays.

Any Makefile which lists dependencies while expecting them to be
satisfied sequentially, one after another, is broken.  Make does not
(theoretically) guarantee the order, while in practice, all "make"
programs I know satisfy dependencies from left to right.

In theory, still, "make" and "make -j4" (say) should yield the same
actions and effect.  Automake-generated Makefiles respect this — or at
least, they once did, I did not check in a long while.

François

P.S. In fact, for the above reason and also for a flurry of other
reasons, often related to portability, almost all Makefiles are broken.
It is so difficult to get them right that an AM_MAINTAINER_MODE macro
has been added to Automake as a way to generate and sanctify incorrect
ones.  A perfect Makefile is very rare.