By using a lot of PHONY targets, I think you're closing a door to one make greatest feature : not redoing those things that are already up to date.
If you consider that every rule can generate a useful file (file containing container image for example) or a dummy file, you can benefit from the date comparison between it and its pre-requisites and diminish greatly the need for PHONY targets. In my opinion, PHONY targets should just be used for comfort of the user launching make, and those targets have simply a dependency to a real file. Le 10 août 2022 21:08:55 GMT+02:00, Katherine Pata <m...@kitty.sh> a écrit : >I often find myself using makefiles to handle things like project linting, >container images, various scripts, initiating tests, and other misc tasks. >Sometimes these include tasks that have real dependencies that make should >keep track of, but often the vast majority of targets are phony. > >Something like --reverse-phony or a variable like .GENUINE or .REAL that is >mutually exclusive with .PHONY would be really helpful. > >Would there be interest in developing this for GNU Make? If someone creates a >patch, would this be accepted? > >Has this been discussed before?
