Re: Proposed syntax for coincidental rules

[Alessandro Vesely]

Paul D. Smith wrote:
> %% Alessandro Vesely <address@hidden> writes:
>
>   av> From their prototypical man page for make it is fairly clear
>   av> that Henning Makholm's proposed syntax was not coherent. See
>   av> "Proposed syntax for static make-also rule"
>   av> http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/make-alpha/2002-12/msg00000.html
>
> I'm not sure what you mean by "coherent".
Henning wrote "In order to pretend that makefile syntax has any logic to it"
because he realized his syntax might be breaking something, IMHO. Makefiles
syntax would have been different if AND/OR operators had been deemed relevant.

> Let's be clear about what conformance to the POSIX standard means [...]
> What it means is much weaker: that any makefile that is written to
> conform to the POSIX spec, should be correctly parsed and processed by
> GNU make.
I couldn't find a statement about multiple targets in SUS' man page.
SUS clearly states that target rules "can have more than one target name".
But it never says that it "is equivalent to writing many rules" as in
http://www.gnu.org/software/make/manual/make.html#Multiple-Targets .
I wander if running the commands just once would be POSIX compliant.

I cannot recall the point of the original proposal. I'm confused:
If I run my example makefile,

.COINCIDENTAL: target1 target2 target3
target1 target2 target3: something
        cat something | tee target1 | tee target2 > target3

with `make target1 target2 target3', I only get a couple of extra
"make: `targetX' is up to date" with respect to the meant behavior.
Output under -n may also be misleading. However, those are just
irrelevant cosmetic differences that shouldn't deserve deep syntax
changes, aren't they? Then why have you been suggesting tricks like
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/help-make/2004-12/msg00010.html
to achieve that result? What am I missing now?

Perhaps one day I'll learn how make works... in the mean time I
thank you for your patience, and for your support.