That's true! But: 1. Some of that logic is in the library, meaning the end user of the library can't change them to order-only. 2. It's important to sometimes download them again, because sometimes these versions are updated. But sometimes it's impossible to know when they are out of date, because the publishers of some of these ontologies (and just artefacts on the internet in general) don't always publicize when they have done the new release. So you do want to have them in your build, ideally as part of a single step, e.g. 'make all', rather than making it a two step process 'make clean-download; make all'. Though you could do that.
But yeah this is just 1 use case. I'm sure there are others. The point is convenience. Though what Paul Smith said has given me some pause. I think it'd still be a nice feature, but it has more ill side effects than I originally thought. On Tue, Nov 25, 2025 at 1:29 AM Henrik Carlqvist <[email protected]> wrote: > On Mon, 24 Nov 2025 18:34:15 -0500 > Dmitry Goncharov <[email protected]> wrote: > > What about a dedicated rule that downloads what you need and is not a > > prerequisite of the default target? You can run such rule manually > > whenever needed. > > It would also be possible to make those downloaded files order only > prerequisites of their targets. With order only prerequisites, they will > not > be downloaded again unless they have been removed, maybe by some target > called with something like "make clean-download". > > regards Henrik >
