Define target name in other recipe - makefile

Question

It may be ugly but I'd like to use a macro in a target name which gets a value assigned in another recipe. I know how to define macros/variables in other recipes with the eval function like this:
read :
$(eval TEXT := $(shell cat somefile.txt))
say : read
echo ${TEXT}
It would result in:
$ make say
what ever's in this file
That's fine. Also one can use Macros to define target names. Now let's say I have a file, for example a tar ball, the name of which always starts with 'program-' and ends whith '.bar' and in between is the version which is located in a separate file, e.g. 'program-1.2.3.tar' . So in principle I could define the target for this file with:
VERSION = $(shell cat version.txt)
program-${VERSION}.tar :
tar cf program-${VERSION}.tar program-${VERSION}
Alright, this also works fine. But actually I want to read this file only in a target, e.g.:
.PHONY : getversion
getversion :
$(eval VERSION := $(shell cat version.txt))
program-${VERSION}.tar : gerversion
tar cf program-${VERSION}.tar program-${VERSION}
but of course this doesn't work since make already determines the target name by invoking make in the first place. Is there some way to solve this weird problem without having an extra makefile?

Answer 1

I would suggest you to evaluate VERSION and TAR_VERSION outside out the targets. To set TAR_VERSION as the target name, you should also add it to .PHONY target. The whole thing can be like this,
.PHONY : getversion $(TAR_VERSION)
VERSION := $(shell cat version.txt)
TAR_VERSION := $(addprefix program-, $(addsuffix .tar, ${VERSION}))
getversion :
echo ${VERSION}
$(TAR_VERSION) :
tar cf ${TAR_VERSION} program-${VERSION}

Answer 2

I don't know if I understood your problem in all nuances, but I think you are seeing this more complicated than it really is. As far as your description can be understood, you have the following makefile, which you use to make this and make that, where the former is a target which is not dependant on the program-x.y.z.tar and only the latter asks over a slow connection which version you are actually dealing with:
.PHONY : this that getversion
this:
#echo etc....
that: program-${VERSION}.tar
#echo done with program-${VERSION}
getversion :
$(eval VERSION := $(shell cat version.txt))
program-${VERSION}.tar : getversion
tar cf program-${VERSION}.tar program-${VERSION}
This however is your dependencies misunderstood, if I may say this. The build of that is never dependant on the specific version, only on the pure act of accessing version.txt. You also couldn't sensibly build one specific program-${VERSION}.tar (by passing it as the target on the command line) as you aren't able to specifiy which version, because this piece of information comes from the network. All this hints very strongly to the conclusion, that there isn't a dependency involved between that and program-${VERSION} which simplifies the makefile to:
.PHONY : this that getversion
this:
#echo etc....
that: getversion
#echo done with program-${VERSION}
getversion:
$(eval VERSION := $(file < version.txt))
tar cf program-${VERSION}.tar program-${VERSION}