Makefile dependencies don't work for phony target

Question

Here is a reduced version of my Makefile:

.PHONY: all 

all: src/server.coffee
  mkdir -p bin
  ./node_modules/.bin/coffee -c -o bin src/server.coffee
         


        

Answer 1

There needs to be some target file to compare against the modification time of server.coffee file. Since you don't have a concrete target make cannot know if the output is newer then the dependency or not, so it will always build all.