On Sat, 2025-03-15 at 08:28 -0400, Dmitry Goncharov wrote: > On Mon, Mar 10, 2025 at 8:12 AM Paul Smith <psm...@gnu.org> wrote: > > > > On Sat, 2025-03-08 at 11:34 -0900, Britton Kerin wrote: > > > What confuses me is that since the explicitly requested foo > > > exists and isn't out of date with respect to any non-order-only > > > prereqs (in the example it doesn't have any) and therefore isn't > > > getting rebuilt, I wouldn't expect there to be any need to > > > rebuild it's order-only prereqs either. > > > > That's certainly a reasonable way for it to work, but that's not > > how it works. > > Can we change how it works? > i attached a patch here > https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/index.php?66915.
The question we have think carefully about is what sort of backward- compatibility issues, if any, we could introduce. Are there situations where people are relying on the current behavior? Secondly, we should consider which behavior is easier to work around. If there is a reasonable workaround to one choice but not a good way to obtain the other behavior, we should choose the harder to obtain behavior. I'm not really convinced that this need rises to the level of "keep both behaviors with some new syntax or option to choose between them" so I would prefer not to go that way unless it's proven necessary.
