On Fri, 1 May 2026 at 06:59, Eli Zaretskii <[email protected]> wrote: > > From: Tim Murphy <[email protected]> > > > One problem with directories is that their time and date change when > > anything is done on the directory e.g. if a new file is created. I think > > you might need to check that adding a file to one of your directories > > doesn't trigger mıdır on anything below it. Does this matter a lot? Not > > really in this case. > > Order-only dependencies are exactly the means to avoid the dependency > on the time stamps of the directories. So I don't think I understand > what you are saying here. >
At the bottom of his makefile the directories depend directly on each other. . So even though the target files depend on the directories via order-only the directories themselves depend on their parent via a normal dependency. Hence I wondered if any change in a parent directory would trigger a couple of mildly annoying unneeded "mkdir -p" commands for the children. In this situation it is so trivial that it doesn't matter even if this is the case and mkdir -p is harmless either way. In a different situation, if many rules wrote to a parent directory that might trigger a deluge of "mkdir -p" - even so it would only be an annoyance. I had a really unusual situation unrelated to GNU make which made it a disaster and therefore had to come up with the plan of making all directories before any rules were executed. Best regards, Tim
