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by rcarmo·11y ago·view on hn ↗
That Makefile is... weird. Why issue a "make sub-target" command? Makefiles are all about understanding dependencies, so you should actually be doing

    target: dependency
        <commands>
...instead of

    target:
        make dependency
        <commands>
Doing it this way actually breaks dependency checks. It's just plain wrong.

Here's a "proper" Makefile, complete with conditionals, expansion, etc.:

https://github.com/rcarmo/sushy/blob/master/Makefile

...and here's one of my Go Makefiles (no sub-targets here, but does vendoring in a way that's quite similar to what Go 1.5 turned out to adopt)

https://github.com/rcarmo/go-rss2imap/blob/master/Makefile

(edit: whitespace)

2 comments
One thing to point out specifically about "proper" Makefiles: the author should be marking his `.PHONY` targets (https://www.gnu.org/software/make/manual/html_node/Phony-Tar...) and giving sources. This gives you incremental builds for free.

One of my Makefiles: https://github.com/liveplant/liveplant-server/blob/master/Ma...

Definitely open to feedback on the above. Seems like my Makefile doing pretty much the same thing as yours @rcarmo.

good call on the .PHONY.
Thanks rcarmo for bringing this up. You're right, it is a better, and the only right, approach to declare the dependencies like you proposed. I've updated the code!