On Sun, Jun 9, 2019 at 2:47 PM David A. Wheeler <dwhee...@dwheeler.com> wrote: > > Idea: Allow certain special targets as dependencies > > Problem: > It's often the case that a target also needs to be a special target. E.g.: > .PHONY: all > all: do-this do-that > > Obviously this *works*, but it consumes many extra lines & > requires duplication of target names. For example, > if you misspell the "duplicated" names bad things happen. > For short makefiles this isn't a big deal, but with lots of rules > it gets annoying. > > Solution: > As syntactic sugar, > I'd like to see selected special targets allowed as dependencies. > When this happens, it's the same thing as if the target was listed > as a dependency of the special target. E.g., you could express > the same thing above as: > > all: .PHONY do-this do-that > > This doesn't add new *functionality* to a makefile, but if you're > creating a GNU make specific makefile anyway the savings of > lines can be significant. It also eliminates a source of errors.
I also find having to write .PHONY: all over annoying. Not sure the proposed syntax is the best (not that I have any particular problem with it, just wonder if there are any good alternatives). > I propose that this abbreviation with the following special targets: > .PHONY > .PRECIOUS > .INTERMEDIATE > .SECONDARY > .IGNORE > .SILENT > .NOTPARALLEL > .ONESHELL Aren't e.g. NOTPARALLEL and ONESHELL global in effect at the moment? Is the proposal to allow making them target-local or does make already allow that somehow and I'm not aware? The manual says for ONESHELL: ONESHELL If .ONESHELL is mentioned as a target, then when a target is built all lines of the recipe will be given to a single invocation of the shell rather than each line being invoked separately (see Recipe Execution). The documentation for other special built-in targets mentions their sensitivity to supplied prereqs (e.g. .PHONY). Maybe the docs need fixed here. Britton _______________________________________________ Bug-make mailing list Bug-make@gnu.org https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-make
