#652 Need to destroy .d files

[Jonathan Dushoff]

I sometimes chicken out of even telling people that their projects are fine but I needed to destroy the .d files because WW was still looking for old typos (or old omissions, for example when people don't type graphics file extensions).

What if the .d files said

.PHONY: target.latex.pdf.wwprecursors
target.latex.pdf.wwprecursors: test.Rout.pdf

instead of

target.latex.pdf: test.Rout.pdf

and then the rule could say:

%.latex.pdf:
    - $(MAKE) $@.wwprecursors
    $(Downstream_part)

I have no idea if the .PHONY is necessary or useful here ... but otherwise this seems good to me, right? It should try to make, but not fail. Most importantly, the downstream part will run and fix the outdated .d file.

[Jonathan Dushoff]

Apparently the point of .PHONY is for the rule to still work if a phile with that name is ever created. I guess that means I vote against using the .PHONY.

[Lee Worden]

I'd need to review the makefile to say anything smart about it. Should we stick that change into the latex makefiles on lalashan and see what it does?

[Jonathan Dushoff]

I would try it offline first, I think.

I guess I'm a little bit scared of trying to figure out how the .d files are made, or I'd have tried it offline already.

Also, I guess it is in the "real" (not "site") resources directory, which means I'm not allowed to touch it, right?

[Lee Worden]

Fair enough.

In principle you're supposed to be able to use the site makefiles to
override things in the resources makefiles. Also we could coordinate on
tweaking it. I'm willing to decipher the .d rules, but will need to
find a time.