On Sat, 2019-11-02 at 06:01 -0400, Robert P. J. Day wrote: > > > in this Makefile, there are a number of "paired" targets such as: > > > > > > clean_mystuff: > > > .clean_mystuff_fail: > > > > > > which seems to suggest some kind of pattern, but i have no idea what > > > it might be. > > > > make itself doesn't treat targets starting with '.' any differently; > > this must be a coding convention for these makefiles specifically. > > apparently, after further investigation, this is exactly what it is > ... an internal convention for targets that are not meant to be called > directly by the user. is that a well-known idiom?
I think it is just an extension of the fact that make uses targets starting with "." as its built-in targets. I can't really say if it qualifies as "well-known", but it's not unheard of. Note, however, that POSIX reserves some part of the ".<target>" namespace as described in the spec: > Targets with names consisting of a leading <period> followed by the > uppercase letters "POSIX" and then any other characters are reserved for > future standardization. Targets with names consisting of a leading > <period> followed by one or more uppercase letters are reserved for > implementation extensions. so you shouldn't infringe on that (the above is fine since it uses lowercase letters).
