99% of the time it’s fine, because 99% of the time the person who wrote the Makefile undertands Makefiles and knows that the first thing you do is define a default target. A default target that’s chosen reasonably is a very nice feature of make because there are no standard names for targets, and no easy way to find out the names of targets other than trying to read the Makefile, which can be a pain in the ass.
oh god early career, coding on a 20 year old program
using makefiles to compile while on a remote host
lack of target resulted in trying to programatically delete the remote hosts root
thank good i did not have the permission
why is defaulting like this a thing instead of a syntax error?
Bash. Bash is why.
99% of the time it’s fine, because 99% of the time the person who wrote the Makefile undertands Makefiles and knows that the first thing you do is define a default target. A default target that’s chosen reasonably is a very nice feature of make because there are no standard names for targets, and no easy way to find out the names of targets other than trying to read the Makefile, which can be a pain in the ass.