Re: Makefile remaking loop

[Boris Kolpackov]

address@hidden (Frank Küster) writes:

> I have written a Makefile for a Debian package which works just fine on
> my local machine.  However, on one of the autobuilders (in this case
> it's for Debian experimental) it goes in a seemingly endless loop.

It's because your box is too fast. Just try to prefix your commands
with "sleep 2 &&" and you will get the same endless loop.

You problem is equivalent to the one in the following simple makefile
(assume there is a file called makefile.in in the current directory):

all: ;@:

%: %.in force
        sleep 2 && touch $@

force:
        @true

The endless loop comes from an (implicitly) phony target `force'
which is remade unconditionally and thus renders whatever depends
on it out of date (makefile, in our case). So in your case
the solution would be to get rid of those proxy targets and use
real files instead.

hth,
-boris