The typical format for recipes is:
Target: Dependencies
@echo 'we are cooking your favorite app'
But when you do this:
Dependencies: Target
@echo 'we are cooking your favorite app'
you run the risk of getting the "missing separator error on line nnn" if
the "Dependencies" list is too long--I think my app has a few hundred
data files or so. I am working on this project, and that error kept me
down for a few hours.
What I think happened is that obviously there was some internal error
with heuristics that GNU Make (and most likely others), and the
heuristics engine could not figure out how to parse that long line
(maybe was not expecting data to be so long, or programmer so stupid to
do that) and threw the error.
Anyway, it's a good case to look at!
I also think this should be added to the Automake documentation, but I
don't know Texinfo yet :)
