How can I make a target "private" in GNU make for internal use only? OR: how to best enforce target-specific variable-values?

Question

I have some ancillary targets in a makefile that I want to restrict for internal or "private" use (only) inside the makefile. That is, I want to be able to specify these targets as dependencies from within the makefile, but I want to prevent the target from being specified as a build goal from the command line. Somewhat analogous to a private function from OOP: the target is harmful (or simply doesn't make sense) to build separately.

I wish there were a special-target .HIDDEN or .PRIVATE or something that did this, akin to what .PHONY does for non-file targets, but I don't think this exists. The private keyword is only for variables.

What is a good/general/elegant way to protect a target for internal/private use only?

The best workaround that I could come up with is to check $(MAKECMDGOALS) for "unacceptable" targets, then error-out if specified; this seems inelegant. I'm sure the makefile could be rewritten to avoid this situation -- perhaps a superior solution -- but that's not practical here.

---

Below the cut-line... here's a contrived example for illustration.

Though I'm looking for a general solution, one example of targets that are harmful as individual/primary goal is with inheriting of target-specific variable values:

override CFLAGS += -Wall
all : debug
%.o : %.c
    $(CC) $(CFLAGS) $(CPPFLAGS) -c -o $@ $<
debug   : CFLAGS += -g3 -O0
release : CFLAGS +=     -O3
debug   : CPPFLAGS += -DDEBUG
release : CPPFLAGS += -DRELEASE
debug release : foo.o bar.o main.o
    $(CC) -o $@ $^ $(LDFLAGS) $(LDLIBS)
clean:
    -rm -f *.o debug release
.PHONY: all clean

Implicit rule duplicated (unnecessary) for illustration. With the goal of debug or release, foo.o and others will inherit respective CFLAGS and CPPFLAGS -- If one does make clean debug all objects will be consistent. But for example if someone builds foo.o separately, it will fail to inherit the appropriate flags; e.g., make clean foo.o debug you'll get foo.o built with default CFLAGS; then it doesn't need to be updated when building debug, so it will be linked with other objects with different optimizations or different macro settings. It will probably work in this case, but it's not what was intended. Marking foo.o, etc. as illegal goals would prevent this.

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EDIT:

It's very clear that my example (above) was not a good choice for my more-general question: hiding targets was not the best way to fix an issue with my example. Here's a modified example that illustrates the modified question "How to enforce target-specific values?" -- it builds on commentary from @Michael, @Beta, @Ross below, and allows posing and answering this more limited scenario.

As described in previous responses below, it's a much better idea in this case to create objects that have different build flags in separate locations. e.g.,

bin_debug/%.o   : %.c
    $(CC) $(CFLAGS) $(CPPFLAGS) -c -o $@ $<
bin_release/%.o : %.c
    $(CC) $(CFLAGS) $(CPPFLAGS) -c -o $@ $<
OBJS = foo.o bar.o main.o # or $(SRCS:.o=.c)
DEBUG_OBJS   = $(addprefix bin_debug/,$OBJS)
RELEASE_OBJS = $(addprefix bin_release/,$OBJS)
debug   : $(DEBUG_OBJS)
release : $(RELEASE_OBJS)
debug release :
    $(CC) -o $@ $^ $(LDFLAGS) $(LDLIBS)

Pattern rule duplicated because I think it has to be (multiple "pattern targets" (%) convince make all targets are built at once with one recipe; see SO questions this and this).

So now, add in target-specific flags:

debug   : CPPFLAGS += -DDEBUG
release : CPPFLAGS += -DRELEASE

But this still suffers:

make bin_debug/foo.o

will not get the CPPFLAGS from debug. I've accepted @Michael's answer below as it got me thinking about the problem in a more helpful way, but also answered some of my own rhetorical questions below.

Answer 1

You kind of can define private targets by starting their name with two hyphens.

--private-target:
    @echo private

public-target: --private-target
    @echo public

You can call make public-target but make --private-target will complain about an unknown option:

$ make public-target
private
public

$ make --private-target
/Library/Developer/CommandLineTools/usr/bin/make: unrecognized option `--private-target'

This is not a feature of make, but takes advantage of the fact that command line options are passed with two hyphens and as a result make will complain about an unknown option. This also can be easily bypassed by signaling the end of options:

$ make -- --private-target
private

---

$ make --version
GNU Make 3.81
Copyright (C) 2006  Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This is free software; see the source for copying conditions.
There is NO warranty; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A
PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

This program built for i386-apple-darwin11.3.0

Answer 2

The problem you are trying to solve is legitimate but you are heading on the worse possible path to solve it.

Declaring private targets does not make any sense

When we write a Makefile, we are describing a compilation job in terms of targets, sources and recipes. The advancement of this job is described by the set of targets which are already built. Now you are accurately observing that the sequence

make clean
make foo.o
make debug

will produce objects whose format is inconsistent with foo.o thus leaving your build directory in an inconsistent state. But it is very wrong to deduce that the user should not be able to construct foo.o explicitly. Consider the following sequence:

make clean
# Wait for foo.o being compiles and
#  interrupt the build job with a signal
make debug

Since make sees that foo.o it will resume its task where it was at and left foo.o untouched while compiling subsequent units with different flags, leaving the build directory the same inconsistent state as in the first scenario.

Hence, if we could implement private targets in Makefiles, this would be ineffective and could convey a false sense of security, which is even worse than insecurity by itself. Also the solution you imagined annihilates one of the most important advantages of using Makefiles over shell scripts: Make makes it easy to continue an interrupted task where it was at.

I documented some other aspects of using Makefiles in relation to the set of targets already built in my answer to the question “What is the purpose of linking object files separately in a Makefile?”.

Another solution to your problem

To address the issue of compilation flags inconsistency, we can arrange to store built targets into a special directory, depending on the compilation flags used. Implementing this would fix the issue without forcing us to resign upon the ease of resuming an interrupted compilation job.

Here is an implementation roadmap:

1. Identify build profiles, here you have release and build.
2. Choose which compilation to use for each build profile.
3. Choose in which directory to store built targets for each build profile.
4. Write your Makefile so that built targets are stored in the directories you choosed. Please refer Gnu make - how to get object files in separate subdirectory.

Note. In my opinion, the BSD variant of make has a much nicer support for writing targets in a special directory, see my answer to the question “How to write a Makefile using different directories for targets and sources”. Generally I prefer the BSD variant of make because its documentation is short and to the point and it enjoys a lot of useful advanced examples, since operating system build and ports build in the BSD world are orchestrated by this program.

Answer 3

One solution to the problem is to migrate the CPPFLAGS to the pattern rules (e.g., bin_debug/%.o: CPPFLAGS...) instead of the regular rule (debug: CPPFLAGS...), final result:

bin_debug/%.o   : CPPFLAGS += -DDEBUG
bin_debug/%.o   : %.c
    $(CC) $(CFLAGS) $(CPPFLAGS) -c -o $@ $<
bin_release/%.o : CPPFLAGS += -DRELEASE
bin_release/%.o : %.c
    $(CC) $(CFLAGS) $(CPPFLAGS) -c -o $@ $<
OBJS = foo.o bar.o main.o # or $(SRCS:.o=.c)
DEBUG_OBJS   = $(addprefix bin_debug/,$OBJS)
RELEASE_OBJS = $(addprefix bin_release/,$OBJS)
debug   : $(DEBUG_OBJS)
release : $(RELEASE_OBJS)
debug release :
    $(CC) -o $@ $^ $(LDFLAGS) $(LDLIBS)

so make bin_debug/foo.o will get CPPFLAGS including -DDEBUG.

Now, lets say you have >>2 rules: debug, release, config01, config02, config03, ... each with their own CPPFLAGS.

One way might be to continue reduplicating all of the pattern rules, but that gets annoying if anything has to change. Furthermore it's not really possible to use in a foreach. This seems handy:

debug    : CPPFLAGS+=-DDEBUG
release  : CPPFLAGS+=-DRELEASE
config01 : CPPFLAGS+=-DSOMETHING
config02 : CPPFLAGS+=-DSOMETHINGELSE
TARGETS = debug release config01 config02
OBJS = foo.o bar.o main.o # or $(SRCS:.o=.c)
define TARGET_template
 bin_$(1)/%.o : %.c
    $$(CC) $$(CFLAGS) $$(CPPFLAGS) -c -o $@ $<
 $(1): $(addprefix bin_$(1)/,$(OBJS))
 # other TARGET-specific stuff here
endef
$(foreach tgt,$(TARGETS),$(eval $(call TARGET_template,$(tgt))))

But still doesn't fix the situation of make bin_debug/foo.o -- still doesn't get CPPFLAGS.

So, instead of making target-specific variable-value like debug: CPPFLAGS+=... you could have a variable that is specific to the target, like CPPFLAGS_debug, then add to each rule:

CPPFLAGS_debug    = -DDEBUG
CPPFLAGS_release  = -DRELEASE
CPPFLAGS_config01 = -DSOMETHING
CPPFLAGS_config02 = -DSOMETHINGELSE
TARGETS = debug release config01 config02
OBJS = foo.o bar.o main.o # or $(SRCS:.o=.c)
define TARGET_template
 bin_$(1)/%.o : CPPFLAGS+=$$(CPPFLAGS_$(1))
 bin_$(1)/%.o : %.c
    $$(CC) $$(CFLAGS) $$(CPPFLAGS) -c -o $$@ $$<
 $(1): $(addprefix bin_$(1)/,$(OBJS))
 # other TARGET-specific stuff here
endef
$(foreach tgt,$(TARGETS),$(eval $(call TARGET_template,$(tgt))))

Beware; above may need more $$(...)s, untested.

Problems? Better way?

Answer 4

I don't think there's any "elegant" way to have targets somehow made private. I think the only solution that could be called elegant would be to rewrite your makefile so that it doesn't matter what target users invoke, as Beta suggests. It would also have the advantage of making your makefile more maintainable and easier to understand.

A not so elegant but fairly simple way to make targets "private" would be to rename the makefile to something other than one of the default names. Then put a new makefile in it's place that invokes the "private" makefile to do it's work. Something like:

.SUFFIXES:

PUBLIC_TARGETS = all debug release clean
REAL_MAKEFILE = private.mak

define invoke_make
 $(1): $(REAL_MAKEFILE)
    $(MAKE) -f $(REAL_MAKEFILE) $(1)
endef

$(foreach target, $(PUBLIC_TARGETS), $(eval $(call invoke_make,$(target))))

.PHONY: $(PUBLIC_TARGETS)

Obviously this doesn't prevent a determined user from invoking "private" targets, but hopefully it makes it clear that they shouldn't be doing this. That's all making things private in object-oriented languages does anyways. It's always possible for a sufficiently determined user to bypass it.

Answer 5

Thinking about this and tried the following:

TEST := $(shell echo $$RANDOM)

test : $(TEST)

$(TEST):
<tab>@echo tada $(TEST)

then doing a make test on command line seems to work and I think it would be difficult to get the result without using the test target. Maybe this path can help?

Answer 6

Even if previous speakers called this a bad idea, I was very interested in the concept of having a custom special target like .PRIVATE to more or less protect some targets from beeing called straigt.

And for everyone interested in it... this is what I came up with:

ifeq ($(strip $(filter .PRIVATE,$(MAKECMDGOALS))),)
__PRIVATEGOALS = $(shell make -f $(firstword $(MAKEFILE_LIST)) -n .PRIVATE | tail -n 1)
$(foreach __privgoal,$(__PRIVATEGOALS),$(eval __PRIVATECMDGOALS += $(filter $(__privgoal),$(MAKECMDGOALS))))
endif

ifneq ($(strip $(__PRIVATECMDGOALS)),)
$(error tried to call *private* goal(s) $(strip $(__PRIVATECMDGOALS)))
endif

.PHONY: .PRIVATE
.SILENT: .PRIVATE
.PRIVATE:
    @#
    $^

Put it at the top of your makefile, or at least in front of the first target declared as private. You could as well put it into a separate file, like private.mk and include it in your main makefile.

You should be able to use the .PRIVATE target in the same way as you use the .SILENT or the .PHONY targets. An error is triggered in case a "private" target is called and make stops.