RE: folder deps

[Dan Oelke]

Adam,

I ran into almost the same problem.
I had directories that I wanted the makefile to generate, but if I made 
the things in the directories dependent on the directories then I was 
constantly (and needlessly) rebuilding the world.

I *just* solved it by not making those things in the directories 
dependent on the directory itself.  Instead I just force a creation of 
the directory every time make is invoked by using := and $(shell).  
mkdir failures are silently ignored.  For a small number of directories 
this isn't a big performance hit.  The only thing that worries me is 
silently ignoring the mkdir failures.  I ignore them because it fails 
once the directory is already there. 

Thanks to John Grahm-Cumming for writing up the idea of using := and shell.

Using your example - it would now look something like this.

       # Create folders.
       #$(INTDIR) $(OUTDIR):
       #        mkdir -p $@
        DUMMY := $(shell mkdir -p $(INTDIR) 2>&1)
        DUMMY := $(shell mkdir -p $(OUTDIR) 2>&1)

       # Run definitions through the encoder.
       $(TARGET): $(OUTDIR) $(ENCODER) 
               @echo "Generating Output..."
               $(ENCODER) gen.def $(OUTDIR)


Hope this helps.