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disparity in Paul’s Rules


From: David Boyce
Subject: disparity in Paul’s Rules
Date: Wed, 18 Feb 2015 17:01:02 -0800

Am I missing something or is one of the iconic “Paul’s Rules of
Makefiles” a little wrong (or outdated)? Rule 5 at
http://make.mad-scientist.net/papers/rules-of-makefiles/ says:

"Every non-continued line that starts with a TAB is part of a command
script–and vice versa.”

But it’s not really as simple as that. Consider this test makefile:

% cat makefile
AA = 12
        BB #= 42

.PHONY: all
all:
        @echo "AA=$(AA) BB=$(BB)”

The BB line is prefixed with a tab and is not continued. With the
comment character in place it provides a ‘recipe commences before
first target. Stop.’ error but with the # removed it’s treated as a
valid variable assignment despite the leading tab:

% make
AA=12 BB=42

Clearly make “forgives” assignments which use a leading tab. I can’t
find anything explicit about this in the manual but the description of
the above error implies the same:

‘recipe commences before first target. Stop.'
"This means the first thing in the makefile seems to be part of a
recipe: it begins with a recipe prefix character and doesn’t appear to
be a legal make directive (such as a variable assignment)."

So maybe Rule 5 needs a wording update?

Also, the assignment of BB is clearly not "the first thing in the makefile”.

David



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