On Tue, Sep 20, 2005 at 02:02:24PM -0400, Peter Prymmer wrote: > By the way, why is `false` desirable to have in a Makefile? > Why does MakeMaker need to know how to do it?
It appears it wants to make sure certain targets fail when the commands themselves don't necessarily exit with non-zero. Its the make equivalent of "return 0". There's only three occurances of this. One is specific to OS/2. One is in MM_Unix->perldepend which appears to be unused. Only this one is actually used in day-to-day Makefiles but it only happens if the Makefile.PL is newer than the Makefile, so its not critical code. # --- MakeMaker makefile section: # We take a very conservative approach here, but it's worth it. # We move Makefile to Makefile.old here to avoid gnu make looping. $(FIRST_MAKEFILE) : Makefile.PL $(CONFIGDEP) $(NOECHO) $(ECHO) "Makefile out-of-date with respect to $?" $(NOECHO) $(ECHO) "Cleaning current config before rebuilding Makefile... " -$(NOECHO) $(RM_F) $(MAKEFILE_OLD) -$(NOECHO) $(MV) $(FIRST_MAKEFILE) $(MAKEFILE_OLD) - $(MAKE) $(USEMAKEFILE) $(MAKEFILE_OLD) clean $(DEV_NULL) $(PERLRUN) Makefile.PL $(NOECHO) $(ECHO) "==> Your Makefile has been rebuilt. <==" $(NOECHO) $(ECHO) "==> Please rerun the $(MAKE) command. <==" false -- Michael G Schwern [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.pobox.com/~schwern Insulting our readers is part of our business model. http://somethingpositive.net/sp07122005.shtml