On Wed, Jan 12, 2022 at 6:17 AM Dmitry Goncharov <dgoncha...@users.sf.net> wrote: > > On Tue, Jan 11, 2022 at 3:50 PM Britton Kerin <britton.ke...@gmail.com> wrote: > > It looks like the .SILENT: with a recipe clobbers the .SILENT: > > without > > Consider the following > > hello.tsk: > hello.tsk: hello.h > hello.tsk: hello.o; $(CC) -o $@ $< > > > Here, hello.tsk is the default goal and it depends on hello.o and hello.h. > Multiple rules can provide different prerequisites to the same target. > The above is equivalent to > hello.tsk: hello.o hello.h > You can see that this example mimics your .silent example. > Your makefile provided a prerequisite to .SILENT. Make then knows that > .SILENT has a prerequisite.
I agree that it's consistent syntax, but semantically it's bad. The expectation and the manual both imply that .SILENT: will have a global effect, and a real union-of-effects would have .SILENT: meaning everything and .SILENT: some_target redundant. The root of the problem is that the rule syntax has been recycled for an unrelated purpose, especially so for directives without prerequisites. Britton
