I agree your patches should fix your practical bug (I can reproduce it, two out of three times). My concern is more about making the code cleaner and less likely to grow problems in the future. :) The worse case with patch 3 would be the “Creating directory” message being echoed twice. I am just trying to get the makefile cleaner.

If that block compiled a file, instead of just creating a directory, then it would be a worse problem. The second compile command could truncate the first version, causing errors later on.

Also, I don’t believe adding the dash (-) prefix is a good idea here. It tells Make to keep going even if the command failed. In this case, if the directory already exists, the “if” statement will succeed, and the only way it can fail is if $(INSTALL) fails, which I think we would want to know about. The original “for” loop under libainstall does not include a dash.

bininstall-4.patch implements my suggestion from before.