I think there is something kind of basic I am missing about the gnu make (I am using 3.81 if it matters) static pattern rule matching (which apparently someone else did as well where I work because this was discovered as I was trying to fix a rule that had been commented out). I have tried to simplify my example down to the crux of it (hopefully I haven't' missed anything essential in the real example).
So this appears to work as I'd expect
JUNK:=foo bar
BINS:=$(patsubst %,bin/%,$(JUNK))
all : $(BINS)
.PHONY : all
# This works
$(BINS) : bin/% : %
mkdir -p bin && cp $< $#
But this (which is closer to what I found in the real Makefile) does not
JUNK:=foo bar
BINS:=$(patsubst %,bin/%,$(JUNK))
all : $(BINS)
.PHONY : all
# This doesn't work
$(JUNK) : bin/% : %
mkdir -p bin && cp $< $#
# This doesn't work either
#bin/$(JUNK) : bin/% : %
# mkdir -p bin && cp $< $#
Based on my understanding of what should be happening in both cases I would have expected that both Makefiles would behave exactly the same; however, only the first one behaves as I expected (i.e., properly copies the files to bin) and the second gives the following output
Makefile:12: target `foo' doesn't match the target pattern
Makefile:12: target `bar' doesn't match the target pattern
make: *** No rule to make target `bin/foo', needed by `all'. Stop.
What is more confusing is there are nearly identical other static pattern rules in the make file I was examining that were working.
So I obviously know how to "work around" the issue if need be but I'd like to understand why the second (and the commented out portion in the second code block as well) do not do what I expect them to.
Thanks in advance for any help/insight.
The first one doesn't work because, after expanding the JUNK variable, make sees this:
foo bar : bin/% : %
The way static pattern rules work is that the first pattern (the target pattern) must match each word in the list of targets. That tells make which part of the target name is the stem (the part that matches the %). If the target pattern doesn't match, make doesn't know what the stem is. The pattern bin/% does not match the text foo, (there is no bin/ in the text foo) so you get the error you see.
The second one doesn't work because the result of exanding the JUNK variable in this example (bin/$(JUNK) : bin/% : %) looks like this:
bin/foo bar : bin/% : %
Here, bin/foo matches the pattern, but bar doesn't match and so you get the same error as you did in the previous one.
To make it work you must have bin/ prepended to every target, not just the first target, hence the use of patsubst (or, addprefix would work as well).
Related
My makefile:
./corpus/%.spacy : ./assets/%.json
python3 ./scripts/convert.py $< $#
Two questions:
Even if A.spacy and A.json exist and A.json is updated more recently than A.spacy, I get the following output.
$ make
$ make: *** No targets. Stop.
What to add to have it make A.spacy if only A.json exists? I tried the below code, which didn't work and I feel I'm not fully understanding targets and dependencies in makefiles.
convert : ./corpus/%.spacy
python3 ./scripts/convert.py $(./scripts/$*.json) $<
./corpus/%.spacy: ./assets/%.json
echo $?
Didn't work as in gave the following output
$ make convert
$ make: *** No rule to make target `corpus/%.spacy', needed by `convert'. Stop.
You seem to be thinking that declaring a pattern rule will cause make to go spelunking your directory looking for all possible ways to use that pattern, as if it were a wildcard or something akin to ls *.spacy.
That's not what a pattern rule is.
A pattern rule is a template that make can apply if it wants to build a given target and it doesn't know how to build that target.
If you have the above makefile it just tells make "hey, if you happened to want to create a target that matches the pattern ./corpus/%.spacy then here's a way to do it". If you type make with no arguments, then you haven't told make that you want to build anything so it won't use your pattern rule.
If you type:
$ make ./corpus/A.spacy
now you've told make you want to actually build something (./corpus/A.spacy), so now make will try to build that thing, and it will see your pattern rule and it will try to use it.
As for the other, this:
convert : ./corpus/%.spacy
python3 ./scripts/convert.py $(./scripts/$*.json) $<
is not a pattern rule. A pattern rule must have a pattern character (%) in the target; this is defining a target convert that depends on a file named, explicitly, ./corpus/%.spacy of which you don't have any file with that name, so you get that error.
You didn't actually describe what you wanted to do, but I think maybe you want to do something like this:
# Find all the .json files
JSONS := $(wildcard ./assets/*.json)
# Now figure out all the output files we want
SPACYS := $(patsubst ./assets/%.json,./corpus/%.spacy,$(JSONS))
# Now create a target that depends on the stuff we want to create
all: $(SPACYS)
# And here's a pattern that tells make how to create ONE spacy file:
./corpus/%.spacy : ./assets/%.json
python3 ./scripts/convert.py $< $#
I have the following wildcard "programming" make rule that uploads a binary to a device. This obviously does not produce a real file, so should be marked phony. However, how do you mark a % percent wildcard rule phony?
%-tangnano-prog: %-tangnano.fs
openFPGALoader -b tangnano $^
.PHONY: %-tangnano-prog clean all
The phony rule does not give any error whatever you put there, so hard to tell if it worked. But I believe it did not:
$ touch blinky-tangnano-prog
$ make blinky-tangnano-prog
make: 'blinky-tangnano-prog' is up to date.
Thee are basically two possibilities:
You know in advance what %-tangnano-prog targets you can encounter. Just assign all their prefixes to a make variable, use make functions to compute the full target names and declare them as phony:
P := blinky foo bar
T := $(addsuffix -tangnano-prog,$(P))
.PHONY: tangnano-prog $(T)
tangnano-prog: $(T)
%-tangnano-prog: %-tangnano.fs
openFPGALoader -b tangnano $^
You do not know in advance what targets you can encounter. Use the same Makefile but pass the list of target prefixes to build on the command line:
$ make tangnano-prog P="blinky foo bar"
I have a very bizzare problem with GNU make. I have the following files:
a/x.html
b/Makefile
b/c/Makefile
The contents of a/x.html are irrelevant. The contents of b/Makefile are as follows:
SRC=../a
all: x.html
%.html: ${SRC}/%.html
rsync $< $#
The contents of b/c/Makefile are the same, except for the definition of SRC:
SRC=../../a
If I run make in b/c/ the result is as expected:
rsync ../../a/x.html x.html
and x.html gets copied from a/ to b/c/.
However, if I run make in b/ the output I get is several lines of:
make: stat: ../a/../a/.. (repeated many times) ../a/x.html: File name too long
It seems that make is applying the rule for %.html recursively, but why? Is there something obvious I am missing?
To build a target that matches the pattern %.html (i.e. any target name that ends in .html), make applies the rule if it can build the dependency (target built from the original target with ../a/ prepended).
You ask to build x.html. This matches the pattern %.html, so the rule applies: make sees if it can build ../a/x.html.
../a/x.html matches the pattern %.html, so the rule applies: make sees if it can build ../a/../a/x.html.
../../a/x.html matches the pattern %.html, so the rule applies, etc.
The stem character can match any part of a path, including directory separators.
You can see what make is trying by running make -r -d (-d to show debugging output, -r to turn off built-in rules which would cause a huge amount of noise).
When you're in b/c, this stops at step 2 because ../../a/x.html exists but ../../../../a/x.html doesn't.
One way to fix this is to list the files on which you want to act. You can build that list from the list of files that already exist in ../a:
$(notdir $(wildcard ${SRC}/*.html)): %.html: ${SRC}/%.html
rsync $< $#
This has the downside that if the HTML files in ../a are themselves built by a rule in b/Makefile, then running make in b won't built them in a pristine source directory. This shouldn't be a problem though: it would be unusual to have a makefile in b build things outside b.
Another approach which doesn't have this defect is to use an absolute path.
%.html: $(abspath ${SRC})/%.html
rsync $< $#
I've been trying to get a makefile, a, to include another makefile, b, if the target specified is not found in file a. I'm using this snippet to try and achieve this, but from echos I've put into the file I can see that makefile b is being accessed even when the target is found in a and run.
The snippet I'm using from the link above is:
foo:
frobnicate > foo
%: force
#echo "No target found locally, running default makefile"
#$(MAKE) -f Makefile $#
force: ;
Specifically I'm getting "Nothing to be done" outputs when makefile b is being used, and makefile a is behaving as expected. This is shown below:
$ make all # all target appears in both make files
No target found locally, running default makefile
make[1]: Entering directory `/home/user/currdir' # (b)
make[1]: Nothing to be done for `Makefile'.
make[1]: Leaving directory `/home/user/currdir'
Local all # (a)
Is there a better way to be doing this?
addition: After adding another echo to the % rule, I've found that $# is "Makefile", when it should be the target trying to be built.
I don't really understand your question based on the example you gave; there is no "a" or "b" in that example, just one Makefile.
However, the behavior you're seeing is due to GNU make's re-making makefiles capability. When you create match-anything pattern rules as you've done, you have to consider that every single target or prerequisite that make wants to build will match that rule. That's a large burden.
You can avoid having remade makefiles match by creating explicit rules for them, such as:
Makefile: ;
I want to run pocketlint on all **/*.js files.
.PHONY: lint_js2
LINT_JS = $(wildcard static/js/*.js static/js/**/*.js)
LINT_JS_TARGETS = $(addprefix lint__,$(LINT_JS))
#.PHONY: $(LINT_JS_TARGETS)
lint_js2: $(LINT_JS_TARGETS)
echo $<
lint__%: %
pocketlint $<
However, I get this error:
make: *** No rule to make target `lint__static/js/ad_list.js', needed by `lint_js2'. Stop.
Why lint__static/js/ad_list.js is not captured by lint__%?
If I uncomment second .PHONY, it echoes lint__static/js/ad_list.js, but does not invoke pocketlint static/js/ad_list.js. Why?
If my approach is wrong, what would be the right approach? Since tasks are independent, I would appreciate if make -j50 would do what I am expecting.
Thanks!
It's not clear what is intended: does pocketlint write a file named lint__static/js/ad_list.js, or is that really a phony filename? Anyway...
Reread the second paragraph of How Patterns Match:
When the target pattern does not contain a slash (and it usually does not), directory names in the file names are removed from the file name before it is compared with the target prefix and suffix. After the comparison of the file name to the target pattern, the directory names, along with the slash that ends them, are added on to the prerequisite file names generated from the pattern rule's prerequisite patterns and the file name.
In short, % generally matches just a filename, not a pathname with slashes in it. So lint__static/js/ad_list.js is not captured because actually it is only ad_list.js that is being matched against lint__%.
If you can arrange it so that the output files from pocketlint are static/js/lint__ad_list.js etc, then this could be made to work:
LINT_JS_TARGETS = $(foreach f,$(LINT_JS),$(dir $f)lint__$(notdir $f))
lint__%: %
pocketlint $<
Alternatively you can make % match pathnames by having the target pattern be a pathname (containing a slash):
LINT_JS_TARGETS = $(addprefix linted/,$(LINT_JS))
linted/%: %
pocketlint $<
This time % = static/js/ad_list.js does match the pattern rule.
In either case, you're going to have to have pocketlint produce output (if indeed it produces output) named differently than lint__static/*.
Implicit rule search is suppressed for phony targets (see Phony Targets, paragraph 5). So the rule involving pocketlint is never considered when lint__static/js/ad_list.js is phony.
It's not obvious why the result is Nothing to be done for (phony) lint__static/js/ad_list.js rather than No rule to make target lint__static/js/ad_list.js, but I wouldn't lose sleep over it!