On Tue, Apr 6, 2010 at 8:12 PM, Paul Smith
<address@hidden> wrote:
By convention, but not requirement, the first target in the makefile is
often called "all". Make will try to build "all" and in order to build
"all" it first needs to try to build all the prerequisites of "all",
etc. etc.
Not to argue with Paul, who is of course Always Right in All Things Regarding Make (and i say that with no sarcasm whatsoever), but i would argue that the most common Makefile prefix looks like:
#!/usr/bin/make
default: all
In any case, though, the intention is the same: explicitly name the starting rule, in the same way that the first rule in most parser-generator grammars is the first/head rule.