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Comment by notpushkin | Hacker News Reader

Here’s a one-line horror story for you (from a real project I’m working on):

  .PHONY: $(MAKECMDGOALS)

> The author could have replaced it with a shell script that read $1

Sure, but `./build.sh dev` is a bit less obvious than `make dev`.

Another reason to use Make even if you don’t have any non-phony steps is that you can add those later if needed. (I agree that the author should mark {dev,build,deploy} as phony though.)

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Why is this a horror story? Under certain assumptions of how the author intends to use this, this sounds like a sensible way to define a dynamic list of phony targets to me, without having to specify them by hand.

There are many reasonable scenarios why you might want to do this: determining at the point of calling make which targets to force or deactivate for safety, projects with nested or external makefiles not directly under your control, reuse of MAKECMDGOALS throughout the makefile (including propagation to submakefiles), ...

Consider:

    .PHONY: $(MAKECMDGOALS)

    qux:

    foo: qux

    bar: foo

Now make bar and make foo bar will disagree on whether foo is phony, which may or may not be what one wants depending on both what foo and qux do, and how bar depends on foo and qux side effects.

It also very much depends on what the intent is, notably such a "autophony" make foo is very different from make -B foo.

I got an even better one for you: `./dev.sh`. The author is doing it wrong, and giving Make a bad name.

First of all, misusing a tool doesn’t “give it a bad name”, and second of all who cares? A tool isn’t a human being. Make’s feelings aren’t going to be hurt by this article.

The author just shared something they think is cool. That takes guts to show the world, and our critiques should respect that.

You’ll also want ./build.sh and ./deploy.sh then. If each is 1-2 commands, I’d argue it’s a waste to use separate files here.

> giving Make a bad name

How so?

> I’d argue it’s a waste to use separate files here

Fine. Write a `make.sh` that parses the arguments; that would be better.

> How so?

Well, read the comments here. Do you sense that Make is a beloved tool? Most of the complaints are about some details about syntax, and those complaints are completely valid. If you use Make for its intended purpose, then it's still easily well-worth using, despite that. But if you use it as a glorified script, then all you see is the warts, without any upsides. And you then tell all your friends that "Make sux!" Which is a huge shame because Make is awesome.

Hear hear!

That's fine, the separate files are a benefit here. The only annoyance is clogging up the root project folder -- though some people don't seem to care about that. If they got too numerous (the 5 in OP's "more advanced" project would probably not be too numerous), I'd consider putting the scripts in their own folder. I might even call it 'make' just to mess with people. Then my commands are just make/build and make/deploy and so on (.sh unnecessary). But really, in OP's case, I just have no need for some of their simple wrappers. "npm run dev" is two characters longer than "make dev", pointless.

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