Re: gEDA: Issues with makefiles. . . . .

[Dan McMahill <dan@mcmahill.net>]

On Sat, Sep 04, 2004 at 04:43:39PM -0400, Stuart Brorson wrote:
> Hi gEDA developers --
> 
> I have been working on incorporating gattrib into the top level gEDA
> Makefile system.  While testing gEDA's top level Makefile, I have
> encountered the following questions:
> 
> 1.  In docs/<subdirectories>, the Makefile.am contains the following
> construct:
> 
> uninstall-hook:
>         ( cd $(docname) ; $(INSTALL) -d $(DESTDIR)$(docsdir); \
>           for i in *; do \
>                 -rm -f $(DESTDIR)$(docsdir)/$$i; \
>           done; \
>           rmdir $(DESTDIR)$(docsdir) )
> 
> Where "-rm" is called out instead of "rm" to remove the files.  "-rm"
> also occurs in other places in other docs dirs.  This construct can
> cause "make uninstall" to barf, since it doesn't remove any files from
> the target dir, and then rmdir fails because the target dir is not
> empty.    
> 
> Question:  Is this intended, or is "-rm" a bug.  It appears in lots of
> places in the docs dir.
 
This is a bug.  Putting either an "@" or a "-" as the _first_ character
in one of the commands in the shell command section of a makefile has
special meaning (don't echo the command, and ignore a non-zero exit
code respectively).  Putting the "-" elsewhere like it is here doesn't
do anything from make's point of view, its just passed to the shell.

Besides that, "-f" will keep an exit code of 0 for rm even if the file
does not exist.

-Dan


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