Re: Appending to variables

On Tuesday, June 23rd, 2026 at 8:45 AM, David Deutsch <[email protected]> wr=
ote:

> Like in your other mail - you're trying to go against a fundamental
> concept in make.
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> A target is a target. What you're telling make with:
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> make -f myfile.mk trlfn #(or ndf)
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>   is "I want target myfile.mk to be one thing if I also tell you to
> build trlfn and another thing if I tell you to also build ndf and YET
> another thing if I tell it to also build trlfn and ndf at the same time".
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> That means your Makefile has - in your theory - four separate
> understandings of what myfile.mk fundamentally is.
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> If you keep pursuing this route, you're going to have a bad time because
> make works best when targets have clear and final meanings.
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> The reason why trlfn/ndf does not work is because you have not provided
> a recipe to it, in two different ways: First, you thought a recipe was
> "the thing that make executes when I tell it to make a target" - which
> is kind of true, but not for makefile syntax which is evaluated before
> recipes are built (but in this case, will be ignored). Second: You just
> wrote the recipe behind the colon. That's where the prerequisites go.
> The actual recipe goes into the next line after a tab.

Would there be no prerequisites for such cases?
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> I would think that you're looking for outside variables, but from your
> other email, you already seem to know about those.
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> What you're actually seem to be trying to do is use makefiles as though
> they were a bash script. Wrong tool for the job.
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> -David
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I do not think I am using wrong tool for the job.  If I want
to build my program with gcc, I might need to set compiler
options by specifying what I want to the makefile.  How would
it be a wrong idea?



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> On 6/22/26 22:04, Heime wrote:
> > How can I have targets that append values to variables?
> > Doing as follows produces error on hopc.
> >
> > .PHONY: trlfn ndf
> >
> > trlfn: hopc +=3D --transliterate-file-names
> > ndf: hopc +=3D --node-files
> >
> > What I want is that calling
> >
> > make -f myfile.mk trlfn
> >
> > will append --transliterate-file-names to hopc
> >
> >
> >
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>