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

[Paul Smith]

On Sat, 2019-11-02 at 06:01 -0400, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
> > >    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.
> 
>   apparently, after further investigation, this is exactly what it is
> ... an internal convention for targets that are not meant to be called
> directly by the user. is that a well-known idiom?

I think it is just an extension of the fact that make uses targets starting
with "." as its built-in targets.  I can't really say if it qualifies as
"well-known", but it's not unheard of.

Note, however, that POSIX reserves some part of the ".<target>" namespace
as described in the spec:

> Targets with names consisting of a leading <period> followed by the
> uppercase letters "POSIX" and then any other characters are reserved for
> future standardization. Targets with names consisting of a leading
> <period> followed by one or more uppercase letters are reserved for
> implementation extensions.

so you shouldn't infringe on that (the above is fine since it uses
lowercase letters).