[bug #64571] Add option to print targets

[Paul D. Smith]

Follow-up Comment #3, bug #64571 (project make):

This is the right place for patches.  I did look at this patch; it's not quite
right (IIRC) but of course it could be adjusted relatively straightforwardly.

The hard thing about this request is not the code.  The hard thing is the
design.  I'm just not really that convinced that the simplest thing is going
to be useful to people.

GNU Make is used by so many people for so many things, and I'm leery of
creating some new facility that ends up being "not really right" for what
people want to do, but that then must be maintained forever going forward.

First of all, of course there's no way to show any target that is created by
an implicit rule (well this could be possible but would be a lot of work; we'd
have to have a mode where we resolve all targets without actually building
anything).

Second, it will show explicit targets... but ALL of them, even internal ones
etc.  Even in the comments below someone suggested "especially for phony
targets"... well, now are we suggesting that we want not just one option but
some kind of suite of options that can choose different types of target output
based on various criteria?  It just feels unpleasant.

Here's an experiment you can run in your makefile environment:


$ make -pn | sed -n 's/^\([^#][^=]*:\).*/\1/p;'


What do you get out of this?  This is "more or less" what a simple
implementation of "show all explicit targets" would generate (you can ignore
the suffix rules sprinkled through the output).

Is that really what people are looking for?  I'm just skeptical that this
wouldn't degenerate into a morass of conflicting requests for new features.


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