Re: Compiling git with makepp patch

From: Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>
Date: Aug 24, 2010, 04:32 UTC
Message-ID: <20100824043220.GA20037@burratino>
In-Reply-To: <4C71A53F.2020108@t-online.de>

Hi,

Daniel Pfeiffer wrote:

> .PHONY: FORCE
> 
> I don't know why you depend on a phony that has no rule — I also had
> to make that possible.

Surely the name explains it. :)

Show 5 quoted lines

> The file needs to be built immediately so
> that it can be included, before reading the rest of the makefile.
> But the dependency is only known to be phony after running the rule.
> Here you have a hen-egg problem, where I have no clue how Gnu make
> can cope (this is the one case where it requires .PHONY).

GNU make, unlike, say, pmake, reads all the rules before it runs anything iirc. So you can have

 -include foo

 foo:
	echo bar: >foo
	echo '	echo hi' >>foo

and it will cope okay.

Anyway, the git makefile is very far from topologically sorted; if you are suggesting we change that, that's fine with me, as long as the new rule is somehow justified and consistent.

Hope that helps, Jonathan