RE: how to allow multiple empty commands?

[Paul Smith]

On Thu, 2010-02-04 at 05:44 -0800, Mark Galeck (CW) wrote:
> Yes, the same thing here, no matter .\foobar, ./foobar, or .foobar, I
> always see the warnings.  Now I guess technically, the manual is right
> in the sense that  these are "warnings" not errors that are printed.
> But nevertheless, this is the same printout, error or warning, that
> happens with or without the leading dot, when double rule is used.  It
> would be nice if this thing worked, for then one could always just
> prepend with ./ 

I'm sure the intent was as Greg mentions: for pseudo targets
like .DEFAULT etc.  So, it would not work to use ./ or .\ anyway.

But, I don't see anything in the code that would implement this, and
I've looked all the way back to make 3.74 which was released in 1995, so
I have no idea what this section of the manual is intended to mean or
how long it's been wrong.  The manual says it's for compatibility with
other versions of make, but obviously that compatibility doesn't seem to
be needed since no one noticed until now that it didn't work.

Personally I'm not that interested in having this work as described in
the manual: it seems to be a completely arbitrary and nonsensical
special case.

-- 
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