Re: make -q and maintainer-makefile issues?

[Bruno Haible]

Paul Eggert wrote:
> > I wouldn't want to kill all
> > phony targets from all Makefiles, just for "make -q".
> 
> Sorry, I see that I wasn't clear earlier.  Not all phony targets have
> the problem.  For example, the following works fine:
> 
> .PHONY: all
> 
> all: foo
> 
> foo: /etc/motd
>       cat /etc/motd >$@
> 
> The problem occurs only when a phony target has a nonempty action,
> and when "make -q" depends on the phony target.

Thanks for explaining. But I'm still not sure I understand. What is
the difference between your test case

---------------------------------
all: foo
foo: /etc/motd
        cat /etc/motd >$@
---------------------------------

and the snippet from modules/relocatable-prog

---------------------------------------
uninstall-hook: uninstall-relocwrapper
uninstall-relocwrapper:
        some-statements;
---------------------------------------

and the pattern from po/Makefile.in.in:

---------------------------------
all : sanity
all : foo
sanity :
        @test `expr 1 + 1` = 2
foo :
        echo > foo
---------------------------------

The target has non-empty statements in each case.

> If you can program a sanity check this way:
> 
> sanity:
>       @$(SANITY)
> 
> where SANITY expands to the empty string if the check succeeds,
> and to 'false' if it fails, then 'make -q' should work.  This is
> true regardless of whether 'sanity' is phony.

An interesting idea. But in the special case of po/Makefile.in.in
I cannot use it, without making use of GNU make $(...) function call
expressions.

Bruno
-- 
In memoriam Maximilian Kolbe <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maximilian_Kolbe>