database buildup and reciepe execution

[Warlich, Christof]

Hi,

consider the following makefile:

.PHONY: all
all: PT xxx
xxx: yyy ; cp $< $@
.PHONY: PT
PT: ; touch xxx

As much as I thought I understood, make _first_ builds up its database to 
determine what to do,
and _then_ executes the recipes accoding to that result. But unfortunately, my 
understanding
doesn't match the behaviour in the example above:

Let's assume yyy is newer than xxx or that xxx doesn't exist. Why is the 
reciepe belonging to
"xxx: yyy ; cp $< $@" not called after the reciepe belonging to "PT: ; touch 
xxx"? I would have
thought that Make cannot know during buildup of its database that rule "PT: ; 
touch xxx" is going
to update xxx?!

Thanks for any advice to improve my understanding,

Chris