Re: order-only prerequisites don't behave as I'd have expected after reading the documentation

[dprovan]

Forgive me for reviving this 2 year old thread, especially because there's no
make bug in sight, but this is the only place I've found this issue
discussed, so I wanted to make a couple comments and then ask a question:


Philip Guenther-2 wrote
> I think I would use a test on $(MAKECMDGOALS) to make T1 a
> prerequisite of T2 if and only if T1 is a goal, say...
> 
>      ifneq ($(filter T1,${MAKECMDGOALS}),)
>      T2: T1
>      endif

The specific problem I was having was "make -j clean all", an idiom I use
because I can never remember "-B", and I always assumed it was equivalent.
But it's not. With "-j", clean and all are invoked in parallel, which is
brilliant, but causes this ordering problem. Thanks to this thread, I
understand why order-only prerequisites are not the answer, and the
MAKECMDGOALS suggestion pointed me in the right direction.

The simple solution (which works when all targets are phony and none depend
on the others) is:

    $(filter-out clean distclean,$(MAKECMDGOALS)): $(filter clean
distclean,$(MAKECMDGOALS))

The more general solution (which I found somewhere on the web) is to define:

    CLEAN_DEP=$(filter clean distclean,$(MAKECMDGOALS))

and then add $(CLEAN_DEP) as a prerequistie to any targets that cannot be
run in parallel with the clean targets.

Now the question: now that the smoke has cleared, I believe I understand
that when the prerequisite is phony, it makes no difference whether it's
order-only or not. Am I missing something? I was puzzled by the comments
about the targets being phony, since I was totally on the same page as
Stefano, but now that I realize the error in my thinking, it makes perfect
sense that people would wonder about their phoniness, since being phony
makes order-only uniniteresting.

-don provan
address@hidden



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