On Wed, 2020-10-14 at 13:18 +0100, Jonathan Wakely wrote: > Shouldn't special targets like .PHONY be listed in the index at > > https://www.gnu.org/savannah-checkouts/gnu/make/manual/html_node/Concept-Index.html#Concept-Index_cp_symbol-9 > > ? > Similarly for .SUFFIXES and others.
For some historically lost reason, GNU make contains two indexes. There's the concepts index which you referred to, but there's also the "Index of functions, variables, and directives" here: https://www.gnu.org/software/make/manual/html_node/Name-Index.html .PHONY, .SUFFIXES, etc. appear in this second index. I agree that it is kind of annoying to have two indexes (I typically leave two browser tabs open, one with each index in it). However that's how Roland and Richard created the manual and I haven't tried to unify them. I'm not sure what others think about doing so.
