Re: Bug#218367: make: strange behavior with multi-target rules

[Ted Stern]

On 10 Nov 2003, Manoj Srivastava wrote:
>
> Surprise #3: refactor like this
>
> $(TEX) : junk
>
> junk: $(SOURCES)
>       ./bin/plit -n $(SOURCES)
>
> touch Blah.sml.  Now make modules.tex runs the last rule (once), but
> not the first rule (for modules.tex itself), even though it clearly is
> out of date!

In this case, make needs to build junk before it can build $(TEX).  But the
rule for junk doesn't actually build a file.  So $(TEX) can't be built.

Try declaring junk as a .PHONY target:

    .PHONY:   junk

For better debugging of your problem, try running make with the -d flag.

Ted
-- 
 Ted Stern                                 Applications Group
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