Follow-up Comment #4, bug #63098 (project make): Yes, I saw that behavior when I looked at the repo. I agree it's difficult to see how to map that onto make's current behavior. I'll take a look through the manual to see if that change (which was somewhat last-minute) might be going against some previously-guaranteed behavior.
In general it's very hard to express a situation like "the set of output files being generated depends on the contents of the input file" in make; it wasn't really designed that way (as an extreme example this is why you can't use make with Java very well). If only some of the msg files generate .cxx files then my last option below, splitting into two different pattern rules, would probably work best. Another option of course is (since they already require GNU make) to simply use a $(shell ...) function to grep out which msg files contain the special marking, and use a static pattern rule to handle those differently with a different set of outputs. Unfortunately without GNU make 4.3's grouped targets it's tricky to get this right; if you want to run with older versions of GNU make this won't work well. _______________________________________________________ Reply to this item at: <https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?63098> _______________________________________________ Message sent via Savannah https://savannah.gnu.org/