On 08/13/2011 11:10 AM, Bruno Haible wrote: > Why is "make -q" looking for a file 'check-macro-version' > although the target is declared phony?
I expect that it's because historically, 'make' always identified rule names with file names, and .PHONY was introduced with a minimum of change to the historical behavior. I also tried using a double-colon rule for check-macro-version, without .PHONY, and that didn't work with 'make -q' either. > Does it mean phony targets are generally incompatible with "make -q"? Apparently so, and that's what I would expect given the documentation that you quoted: a phony target is always considered to be out-of-date, so make -q FOO should fail if FOO is (or depends on) a phony target. It might be worth extending GNU Make to add a new special target, .CHECK say, which would attack this problem. Any dependency of .CHECK should be a rule that is executed purely for its exit status and/or output to stdout or stderr, and all the dependencies of this rule would have a similar restriction. 'make -q' could invoke these rules' actions. The rule names would not be associated with file names. (I haven't thought through this proposal carefully; I'm throwing it out mostly to show the difference between .PHONY and what's wanted here.) In the meantime, though, we're stuck with workarounds such as the one I installed. In this particular case the workaround is not so bad. There may be similar problems elsewhere, in rules that create time stamp files. Getting such rules to work for both -j and -q may be tricky. I have not gone searching for problems in that area, though.
