Makefile: don't try to make generate files .INTERMEDIATE.
What the developer wrote
Authored by Rusty Russell
Makefile: don't try to make generate files .INTERMEDIATE.
Because they get deleted, `make install` ends up regenerating them, and they trigger
object rebuilds.
Signed-off-by: Rusty Russell <rusty@rustcorp.com.au>
What changed, and why it matters
This is a minor build-system fix in the Makefile. It stops automatically generated source files from being treated as temporary files that get deleted after use. Previously, deleting them caused `make install` to regenerate them and unnecessarily rebuild other files. There is no security issue here.
No security action needed. This is a routine build-system maintenance change.
Security signals we found
No strong security signals were identified.
Evidence from the diff
The commit removes the .INTERMEDIATE: $(WIRE_GENERATED) directive from wire/Makefile. In GNU Make, .INTERMEDIATE marks files as temporary build products that are deleted once no longer needed. Because these generated wire protocol files are inputs to other compilation targets, marking them intermediate caused them to be removed, which in turn forced regeneration and object rebuilds during make install. The patch simply prevents that build inefficiency.
Changed components
wire/MakefileInspect captured patch +0 / −2
diff --git a/wire/Makefile b/wire/Makefile
index e52e1f16..71c217a5 100644
--- a/wire/Makefile
+++ b/wire/Makefile
@@ -109,8 +109,6 @@ wire/channel_type_wiregen.c_args := $(wire/channel_type_wiregen.h_args)
WIRE_GENERATED := $(filter %printgen.h %printgen.c %wiregen.h %wiregen.c, $(WIRE_SRC) $(WIRE_HEADERS))
$(WIRE_GENERATED): wire/Makefile
-# You don't need to keep these if they don't exist.
-.INTERMEDIATE: $(WIRE_GENERATED)
maintainer-clean: wire-maintainer-clean
Why this scored 15/100
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