Makefile help needed

[jc at trillian.mit.edu (John Chambers)]

David Kramer wrote:
|
| If I do:
| all: target1 target2 target3 ../otherdir/troubletarget.o
| I get "make: *** No rule to make target ../otherdir/troubletarget.o"
| which I can understand, because it doesn't know where the C file is.
|
| HOWEVER, if I do:
| all: target1 target2 target3 ../otherdir/troubletarget.o
| it simply does not try to build it at all.

So what's the difference between those two lines?  I  tried  aligning
them:

| all: target1 target2 target3 ../otherdir/troubletarget.o
| all: target1 target2 target3 ../otherdir/troubletarget.o

They appear to be identical, and when I feed the two lines  to  uniq,
they  reduce  to  a single line.  So whatever difference there was in
your message seems to have disappeared somewhere in the email system.

I do find a few lines like this in my makefiles, where  a  target  is
built  in another directory.  Aside from the bother of needing a full
description of how to build the file (since the defaults  don't  work
for  this  case),  it works fine.  Maybe the problem is unique to the
release of make that you're using, so you should tell us that.