Re: anything special about "." prefixed targets other than default?

[Paul Smith]

On Fri, 2019-10-11 at 10:18 -0400, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
>   i'm looking at someone else's Makefile, and it is replete with
> targets whose names begin with a period. i'm aware of the property
> that such targets will not be considered as the default, but once you
> define a few early targets, is there any value in continuing to have
> period-prefixed targets?
> 
>   in this Makefile, there are a number of "paired" targets such as:
> 
>   clean_mystuff:
>   .clean_mystuff_fail:
> 
> which seems to suggest some kind of pattern, but i have no idea what
> it might be.

make itself doesn't treat targets starting with '.' any differently;
this must be a coding convention for these makefiles specifically.

I will point out that POSIX reserves all target names beginning with
'.' followed by uppercase letters as reserved for implementations so
it's probably a good idea to not use target names like that in your
makefiles.