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Re: pedantic nitpickery: difference between "goal" and "target"?
From: |
pacalet |
Subject: |
Re: pedantic nitpickery: difference between "goal" and "target"? |
Date: |
Mon, 4 Nov 2019 09:11:54 +0100 |
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Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.15; rv:68.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/68.2.1 |
Le 02/11/2019 à 12:01, Robert P. J. Day a écrit :
>
> junior colleague who is just learning make and is going through make
> manual asked me the other day (regarding section 2.3 in manual) about
> this passage:
>
> "By default, make starts with the first target (not targets whose
> names start with ‘.’). This is called the default goal. (Goals are the
> targets that make strives ultimately to update ..."
>
> the question was, "what is the difference between a 'goal' and a
> 'target'?"
>
> i wasn't quite sure ... i didn't think there was any substantive
> difference. the best i could come up is that targets define what *can*
> be invoked, while the goal is the target you're currently *trying* to
> update, but that sounded pretty lame.
>
> is there a better explanation? or am i overthinking this?
As far as I understand the make parlance, a "goal" is passed to make on the
command line:
make GOAL1 GOAL2...
It is what we really want, not the intermediate targets that make may also
build to reach the goals. If make is invoked without a goal a default one is
selected, based on the rules you already know.
Remarks:
* A goal must be a target, else you get an error because make does not know how
to reach the goal.
* A target is not necessarily a goal for a given make invocation. Indeed,
usually, most targets are not goals.
* Any target can be a goal if make is invoked with this target as the specified
goal (or if it is the default goal and make is invoked without a specified
goal).
>
> rday
>
--
Renaud Pacalet
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