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 propose that this abbreviation with the following special targets: .PHONY .PRECIOUS .INTERMEDIATE .SECONDARY .IGNORE .SILENT .NOTPARALLEL .ONESHELL --- David A. Wheeler _______________________________________________ Bug-make mailing list Bug-make@gnu.org https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-make
