(CC'ing a...@debian.org directly in case this has been missed)
I wrote an analysis on the bug last year, but in summary I believe this
GNU-specific construct:
%:
dh $@
is equivalent to
.DEFAULT:
dh $@Any makefile having a .DEFAULT rule should be exempt from this Lintian error. Treating '.DEFAULT:' like an alias for '%:' should fix this problem. The FTP upload queue rejects packages with this false-positive Lintian error and does not allow an override for it. I acknowledge that Lintian probably doesn't want to call external tools, but maybe in the future it would be smart for Lintian to let the make program be the judge of whether a target exists, since that'll be what matters at build time anyway. This could be done by calling 'make -f debian/rules -q clean binary binary-arch binary-indep ...' and the exit code (it's two if the target doesn't exist and zero or one otherwise). To save computational effort in the common case, Lintian could elect only to do this if it would otherwise emit the error from its own parsing and suspects a required target is indeed missing.
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