intermediate files being removed despite .PRECIOUS

[Damian Marriott]

Hi

I am having problem with GNU make 3.78.  I've tried the newsgroups and
found a pointer to this email address (and nothing else of
assistance).  I'm hoping you can help.

I have a fairly complicated makefile setup.  The problem I'm having is
that make is removing files after successfully building the target
which I don't want it to remove, since next time I make if those files
aren't there, off it goes making them again (and then removing them).

Now, I understand that intermediate files are removed by default,
which can be overridden by .PRECIOUS.  The prerequisties for .PRECIOUS
that I list are in terms of variables which contain '%' for patterns.
Now I run make with -p and the .PRECIOUS target looks to have what I
would expect with my variables expanded with the '%' in the correct
place, something like:

.PRECIOUS: ../../../abc/lib/%/libxyz.a ../../../abc/lib/%/libijk.a

The target I'm building has these as prerequisites, and the rule for
making them cd's to ../../../abc/lib and makes the relevant targets.

The thing I don't understand (or perhaps the pointer to a bug?) is
that if I explicitly list ../../../abc/lib/actualdir/libxyz.a then the
file is not removed.  Can you shed some light on this matter or offer
any suggestions as to how I might try to fix this situation?

Thanks

Damian

-- 
Damian Marriott                     Email: address@hidden
DSTO Information Technology Division                    Phone: +61 8 8259 5749
PO Box 1500, Salisbury SA 5108, Australia                 Fax: +61 8 8259 6011