%% "Albert L. Ting" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
alt> Doing a "make -q" with the following makefile returns a 1 status
alt> where it should really return a 0 status. Can this be fixed? I
alt> know I could wrap an ifndef expression around the ALL commands,
alt> but I use this a lot.
alt> commands :=
alt> .PHONY: all
alt> all: foo
alt> $(commands)
alt> foo: bar
alt> touch foo
I think I see what you mean; you have a foo and a bar and those don't
need to be built, but because the "all" rule has commands it will always
get run, and -q will always return 1.
What you're saying is since $(commands) is really empty, there aren't
any commands to run and make should return 0 here.
Hmm. The problem is that make _does_ make an important distinction
between:
all: foo
which is just a target/dependency declaration, and
all: foo ;
which is a complete rule. Although the command list is empty, and make
does have special processing to avoid invoking a do-nothing shell in
this case, they are not equivalent.
Hmm hmm. If the change you want were made, it would mean that -q would
always return a 0 status for any rule with an empty command script. Hmm
hmm hmm. Offhand I can't think of any reason why that would hurt
anything, except it is a sort of unusual special case, in some ways;
documenting it might be painful.
Also, unfortunately right now there are about 4 different places during
the invocation of a rule's command set where we check for an empty
command string; it would be kind of gross to add an extra check in each
of those places for the -q option. I've long felt that there is
excessive processing going on there, but I haven't delved into the guts
to determine which checks might be superfluous.
--
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Paul D. Smith <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Find some GNU make tips at:
http://www.gnu.org http://www.paulandlesley.org/gmake/
"Please remain calm...I may be mad, but I am a professional." --Mad Scientist
