Re: [PATCH v4 1/9] scalar Makefile: use "The default target of..." pattern
From: Junio C Hamano <hidden>
Date: 2022-03-02 19:35:48
Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason [off-list ref] writes:
Make have the "contrib/scalar/Makefile" be stylistically consistent with the top-level "Makefile" in first declaring "all" to be the default rule, follwed by including other Makefile snippets.
Sorry, but I cannot quite parse it. Perhaps remove "have"?
This adjusts code added in 0a43fb22026 (scalar: create a rudimentary executable, 2021-12-03), it's a style-only change, in a subsequent commit the "QUIET" boilerplate at the beginning of this file will be retrieved via an include, and having an "all:" between the two set of "include"'s after that change would look odd.
In other words, raising these includes to the top is not style-only but is more significant change. I think these two are logically distinct changes, but I am fine to see both in the same commit, as long as they are explained as such.
As noted in [1] using ".DEFAULT_GOAL = all" is another way to do this in more modern GNU make versions, which we already have a hard dependency on, but let's leave any such change for a future improvement and go with using our established pattern consistently for now.
I would suggest dropping this paragraph. In the discussion, we didn't even establish that such a change would be an "improvement", and in fact, not everything new is an improvement. If we know .DEFAULT_GOAL is not used, readers of Makefile do not have to run around and look for it to figure out what happens when "make" is run without argument.