Re: make -q and maintainer-makefile issues?

[Paul Eggert]

On 08/14/2011 03:19 AM, Bruno Haible wrote:
> I wouldn't want to kill all
> phony targets from all Makefiles, just for "make -q".

Sorry, I see that I wasn't clear earlier.  Not all phony targets have
the problem.  For example, the following works fine:

.PHONY: all

all: foo

foo: /etc/motd
        cat /etc/motd >$@

The problem occurs only when a phony target has a nonempty action,
and when "make -q" depends on the phony target.

If you can program a sanity check this way:

sanity:
        @$(SANITY)

where SANITY expands to the empty string if the check succeeds,
and to 'false' if it fails, then 'make -q' should work.  This is
true regardless of whether 'sanity' is phony.