I recently picked up GNU make 3.79.1, and it works wonderfully. However, I did find the manual (both the INFO version and the web version at http://www.gnu.org/manual/make-3.79.1 misleading in one section. When dealing with Generating Pre-requisites Automatically, you provided a nice rule to turn %.c into %.d, and also showed that you could then include $(ALL_D) into your makefile so that header dependencies could be considered. Fantastic! But my C programming habits had me including things at or near the top of the makefile. IMHO, the manual should note that the cc -M command (and hence the %.d : %.c rule) generates lines that make (quite properly) interprets as targets with pre-requisites. Hence, if you put 'include $(ALL_D)' before your explicit targets (like all:), then suddenly the first line of the first included %.d file becomes the default goal. It would be nice if the manual displayed a sample makefile showing the proper placement of the 'include $(ALL_D)' line somewhere past the programmer's first explicit target. bad: # The following is bad because the # 'include $(ALL_D)' declares an # implicit and unintended default goal include rules.mk LIB_C= mod1.c mod2.c mod3.c ALL_C= $(LIB_C) mainline.c LIB_0=$(LIB_C:.c=.o) ALL_O=$(ALL_C:.c=.o) ALL_D=$(ALL_C:.c=.d) include $(ALL_D) all: mainline @ echo "$@ up to date" mainline : mainline.o lib $(CC) ... lib: mylib.a($(LIB_0)) @ echo "$@ up to date" good: # The following is better. # The 'include $(ALL_D)' can safely appear # anywhere past the more intuitive default # goal of all: include rules.mk LIB_C= mod1.c mod2.c mod3.c ALL_C= $(LIB_C) mainline.c LIB_0=$(LIB_C:.c=.o) ALL_O=$(ALL_C:.c=.o) ALL_D=$(ALL_C:.c=.d) all: mainline @ echo "$@ up to date" include $(ALL_D) mainline : mainline.o lib $(CC) ... lib: mylib.a($(LIB_0)) @ echo "$@ up to date" Andrew Sackett SmartCall Back End Development, Austin Email [EMAIL PROTECTED] VNet 671 5162 DID 512 684 5162 Page 1 800 PAGE MCI [724 3624] PIN 140 2823 Click http://www.skytel.com/paging/pageme.cgi?pin=1402823,4 AOL IM ABS144 _______________________________________________ Bug-make mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-make
