how to add a phony target halfway through a make file - makefile

Question

I am looking at a pre-existing, working, complex makefile for a project which will both build and deploy the code on multiple OS's.
I'm looking at some separate IDE support (Visual Studio) for the build process (i.e. half the make will already be done), so need to insert a phony target for the deploy action such that the old flow (make all) still works, including the deloy step, but that make deploy will just do the final deployment step for those using the IDE.
Not being familiar with make, I'm having difficulty seeing how/if make allows such an entry point and if so how to implement it.
The current code has:
$(BUILT_INS): git$X
$(QUIET_BUILT_IN)$(RM) $# && \
ln $< $# 2>/dev/null || \
ln -s $< $# 2>/dev/null || \
cp $< $#
whose actions are the deployment step.
So conceptually I think I need
.PHONY: deploy
$(BUILT_INS): git$X
deploy
deploy:
$(QUIET_BUILT_IN)$(RM) $# && \
ln $< $# 2>/dev/null || \
ln -s $< $# 2>/dev/null || \
cp $< $#
which is clearly not right, because the phony target can't be an action.
In summary; How to create an entry point into a makefile to do the rule's actions? (a critical desire is to avoid duplicating the action code)

Answer 1

Your "conceptually" solution has many more problems than using a target as a recipe (which you're right, won't work, but you could fix by using $(MAKE) deploy as the recipe to invoke a recursive make); the other thing is that this:
$(BUILT_INS):
... using $# ...
means run that recipe one time for each word in the BUILT_INS variable, and each time the automatic variable $# will be assigned to that word (the target).
Your replacement:
deploy:
... using $# ...
does an entirely different thing: it runs the recipe one time, with the value of $# set to deploy. Not going to work.
The simple answer to your question is that you just declare a new target deploy that lists the targets you want to run as prerequisites:
.PHONY: deploy
deploy: $(BUILT_INS)
Now when you run make deploy it will try to build the BUILT_INS targets, and run the install rule for each one.
However, my suspicion is that this will be a problem for you, depending on what the git$X prerequisite is... it might cause a big part of the rest of your makefile to run as well. But, you don't give any information about that so I can't say.
ETA Sure enough, git$X is a problem. So, it appears you want VS to generate your git$X file (which will be git.exe presumably). Then you want to run make deploy to copy it. The trick here is to keep make from rebuilding git$X when you use the deploy target. You can do something like this; replace the rule that builds git$X with:
.PHONY: deploy
deploy: $(BUILT_INS)
ifeq (,$(filter deploy,$(MAKECMDGOALS)))
git$X: git.o GIT-LDFLAGS $(BUILTIN_OBJS) $(GITLIBS)
$(QUIET_LINK)$(CC) $(ALL_CFLAGS) -o $# $(ALL_LDFLAGS) git.o \
$(BUILTIN_OBJS) $(LIBS)
endif
This creates a new target deploy which depends on the BUILT_INS targets, as I show above. Then, I enclose the rule to create git$X inside a test so that if you run make deploy that rule is not defined. Now make doesn't know how to build git$X at all, so if it doesn't exist then make deploy will fail, but if it does exist then make will copy it, without trying to rebuild it.