> | What's the problem with marking these targets as .MADE?
> 
> Then you have to be extra careful, because they will not be re-generated
> even if they are out of date and they have associated rules with them.

But they should be since .MADE is specified as

	"Mark all sources of this target as being up-to-date."

and not "mark target as up-to-date".

make will actually execute the rules associated with .MADE targets, except
in one case which exposes a bug in the `compat mode' code: if the main
target is marked as .MADE and compat mode is on (-B or !-jn) make will
find everything up-to-date.

-pk