Re: Making makefiles with primarily phony targets more friendly

[Paul Smith]

On Wed, 2022-08-10 at 19:08 +0000, Katherine Pata wrote:
> I often find myself using makefiles to handle things like project
> linting, container images, various scripts, initiating tests, and
> other misc tasks. Sometimes these include tasks that have real
> dependencies that make should keep track of, but often the vast
> majority of targets are phony.
> 
> Something like --reverse-phony or a variable like .GENUINE or .REAL
> that is mutually exclusive with .PHONY would be really helpful.

Adding such a command-line option is not right, since that means that
different invocations of make would handle these targets differently
depending on the options used to invoke make.  Whether or not specific
targets are phony is intrinsic to the makefile, not based on the
invocation of make.

I'm not sure I quite understand the suggestion; I think it would need
to be fleshed out and made more detailed first.  How would a variable
like .GENUINE or .REAL work?