Re: dh 7 broken by design?

[Helmut Grohne <helmut@subdivi.de>]

On Tue, Feb 17, 2009 at 12:39:10PM -0500, Joey Hess wrote:
> > GNU make users probably know that this is why there is a .PHONY: ...
> > rule. However that one does not work with implicit dependencies and
> > results in make thinking there is nothing to be done.
> I was not aware of this behavior of make and had assumed .PHONY could be used
> as usual in this case. But I see that bug #509756 was recently opened on make
> about it.

Oh. I found the behavior weired, but never thought about it being a bug.
Good to know it is already reported.

> > However `make -Bf ./debian/rules clean' does not seem to work since make
> > executes `dh ./debian/rules'. I did not find out why.
> Apparently make always tries to run a target with the name of the 
> Makefile. So this causes it to try to build the Makefile
> even though it's up-to-date.

Thanks for explaining ...

> I will make dh handle this case in the next release, by doing the equivilant
> of:
> 
> debian/rules:
> 	# no-op

and solving. :-)

So will the new minimal example look like the following then?

#/usr/bin/make -Bf
%:
	dh $@

Helmut