I appreciate what the person is trying to do, just quickly jot down some notes for new people. For the first concern, phony is mentioned a bit later, likely di

I appreciate what the person is trying to do, just quickly jot down some notes for new people. For the first concern, phony is mentioned a bit later, likely did not want to start-off with added complexity for the reader. For the second point, but then bar.foo and baz.foo are already there and would be up to date, so what's the point in that? Most cases it's not what you want, that note is pointing-out a common gotcha. So though precisely you are totally correct, it's not what the author was going for. Some opinion of mine now. I do not like GNU make document linked. It goes into too much detail and then close to the end is just a short warnings about how so much of the above was GNU specific. I prefer the BSD make man page, but obviously that is not a good starting point for someone new to make. I recommend the book "Managing Projects with make" personally.