<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 TRANSITIONAL//EN"> <HTML> <HEAD> <META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; CHARSET=UTF-8"> <META NAME="GENERATOR" CONTENT="GtkHTML/3.26.0"> </HEAD> <BODY> On Mon, 2010-11-22 at 22:30 -0500, Trevor Woerner wrote: <BLOCKQUOTE TYPE=CITE> <PRE> On Mon, Nov 22, 2010 at 7:21 PM, Gaetan Nadon <<A HREF="mailto:memsize@videotron.ca">memsize@videotron.ca</A>> wrote: > On Mon, 2010-11-22 at 17:26 -0500, Trevor Woerner wrote: > -.PHONY: ChangeLog INSTALL > +.PHONY: ChangeLog INSTALL documents > > I don't think it should be a PHONY target, "documents" is not a file. > It's like the lint target. I thought this is exactly the sort of scenario where a PHONY target is used. From "info make": "A phony target is one that is not really the name of a file. It is just a name for some commands to be executed when you make an explicit request." In other words, when you're done performing "make documents" you don't actually end up with a file called "documents" the way you would if you did, say, a "make hello" in a "hello world" project. "make documents" is just a way to invoke this set of commands from within the Makefile. </PRE> </BLOCKQUOTE> Because we do not expect a file named "documents" to be created, the target name does not "have to" be a PHONY target, but it does not hurt if it is. In contrast, ChangeLog must be a PHONY target or it never rebuilds as it is considered up to date. As Julien suggested, it should be named install-docs perhaps. Try it out with/without PHONY for both ChangeLog and documents. There is nothing wrong in the make info, but they are concerned about not rebuilding a target for every "make target" invocation. In our case, this is what we want as we just want to invoke the real doc target which takes care of the dependencies. In the case of ChangeLog, we do want to rebuild the target (even if it is a file) as it is generated from git and we cannot know if it is up to date or not. </BODY> </HTML>