Re: enhancement: better clarification of search side effects

[Peter Radisson]

Am 01.06.23 um 03:39 schrieb Dmitry Goncharov:
> On Wed, May 31, 2023 at 12:40 PM <Radisson97@web.de> wrote:
> > today i had a strange problem with a long used makefile (GNU Make 4.3).
> > It found a file called "all.sh" and did a "cat <all.sh >all".
>
> That's not a strange problem. That's the default make behavior.

In the moment when you suddenly see that kind of problem is is strange,
i did not remember imediately that .sh was a registered suffix.
The list of predefined suffixes is in "Catalogue of Built-In Rules"
not the first place to look, actually i used google to find it,
searching sh in a document is ambitious.

> > I use makefile for a long time but that effect happend the first time to me.
> > It would be helpful to improve the documentation that people will be aware
> > that this can happen. The phony section has some hints this way, maybe this
> > is a good example to show what happens if you do not use phony.
>
> What piece of documentation do you think is missing?
> Did you see documentation on default suffix rules?

I read that years ago, i remembered when i saw the PHONY page, and
confirmed with make -p.

I use make a lot but only a subset and as seen sometimes i get a
surprise. A beginner may be even more surprised (non of my coworkers
spotted the problem).

IMHO there is a lack examples in the decumentation that are intentionaly
wrong (or show unintended side effects), examples that demonstrate *why*
someone sould do certain things (For now i will add more .PHONY in my
makefiles).

hope that helps,

> regards, Dmitry