Jim Meyering <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > Do you know anyone who prefers that their generated files be writable?
Well, me for starters (:-). It's a minor style thing, but I prefer that files be marked readonly only when they are intended to be unchangeable. Removing a readonly file and replacing it with a new readonly file counts as a change here, since it causes "make" to regenerate things. > how about prefixing each new line with "@" Sometimes that's the best of a bad set of choices, but generally it's better to omit the '@' so that 'make' output can be cut and pasted (and understood by humans). Here the @ doesn't save all that much, so let's omit it. > For the 9 rules that use "cp", I'd prefer your two-liner, but for the > fact that the generated files would not necessarily be read-only. Why wouldn't the generated files be readonly for coreutils? The source is readonly, so cp will create a readonly destination. Here's another thought: how about this even-shorter version instead? alloca.h: alloca_.h $(LN_F_S) $(srcdir)/alloca_.h $@ where $(LN_FS) expands to "ln -fs" in the typical case, or to "rm -f $@ && cp" on hosts where "ln -fs" doesn't work (e.g., Solaris 9 and earlier).