It’s probably a very nice case, but having a prerequisite like “-lfoo” that matches a “libfoo.a” target would be useful for decoupling say one makefile with the rule “main.exe: -lfoo” and another in subdir “foo” that has “libfoo.a: libfoo.a(foo/foo.o)”. The only change needed to have make choose between building the lib and searching for it would be whether to “include foo/Makefile” / add “-f foo/Makefile” when invoking make.
>You cannot use it for libraries make has to build, because make doesn't >know what name to use for them. Remember make starts from the final >target to be built and works backwards, looking at prerequisites. So >when make sees a prerequisite like "-lfoo", it then tries to look up the >name existing on the filesystem using the algorithms described in the >manual. Since the file doesn't exist yet make doesn't know which one it >should build. Using the very first example I gave (-lfoo: libfoo.a(foo.o) ;) it does build the lib, the only issue is that it relinks main.exe on each subsequent run even though libfoo.a hasn’t been touched. I suppose it’s just a quirk of doing something I shouldn’t be. As mentioned “-lfoo libfoo.a: “ fixes that, although I get the feeling it’ll break something at some point that I haven’t considered. _______________________________________________ Help-make mailing list Help-make@gnu.org https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/help-make
