Re: Phony patch target: is it necessary ?
Charles Plessy <plessy@debian.org> writes:
> Hello everybody,
>
> there was recently a discussion on this list about the necessity of
> using $(QUILT_STAMPFN) instead of patch as a patching target. I had a
> look at /usr/share/dpatch/dpatch.make and /usr/share/quilt/quilt.make
> and realised that only Quilt makes the patch target phony. Is there
> actually a good reason for this? I was considering fixing all our
> packages in Debian Med and maybe ask the Quilt and Dpatch maintainers to
> standardise their target names, but maybe the simplest solution is to
> make the patch rule not phony?
Whether explicitly declared phony or not, the target is phony because it
doesn't create a file named patch. Any rule that doesn't create a file
matching the name of the rule is phony; the only purpose of the .PHONY
declaration is to force make to realize this even if a file with that name
exists for some other reason.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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