Subject: Re: pkgsrc reorg proposal II
To: Alistair Crooks <alistaircrooks@excite.com>
From: Marc Espie <espie@schutzenberger.liafa.jussieu.fr>
List: tech-pkg
Date: 01/08/2001 22:21:03
Alistair Crooks wrote:

> Personally, I don't like adding .PHONY targets to bsd.pkg.mk, and would
> prefer to attack the problem at its roots, rather than working around it
> with make(1) settings.

Whatever you finally decide to do with your pkgsrc reorg eventually,
Todd Vierling is right.

Using .PHONY to mark targets that don't correspond to files is always
good policy. That's the way make(1) was meant to be used from day one.

In fact, reducing the number of phony targets, and possibly managing to
remove all of them, is the key to let make -j work.

Of course, this can be rather hairy at times (witness a gcc bootstrap and
the corresponding stmp-* that get generated), but at least it allows make
to work as it's supposed to be. I mean, a Makefile is supposed to be a
collection of recipes to bake some programs, not a glorified repository for
various related shell-scripts.