Follow-up Comment #4, bug #64571 (project make):
....
> I'm just skeptical that this wouldn't degenerate into a morass of
conflicting requests for new features.
Maybe. But this is clearly a highly demanded feature just for
auto-complete/discovery. Seems mean to deny it just because people might ask
for other things too.
Another way to deal with this type of problem (apart from giving make more extensibility through plugins that could be activated on specific conditions) would be to have a fork of gnu make with "light" changes - all made in the right style and without being "too deep" so that it could easily track the original. One could try ideas out there. Someone would have to maintain it obviously and there would be the assumption that it was not stable - so one could try out a new feature and keep breaking it until it "was right". Then it might reach a state where including it in the mainline didn't seem so risky.
FWIW, I think it would be useful to provide any such fork with a way of reporting what features were getting used, on what platforms etc. It's difficult to make decisions about the impact of changes without knowing if/how the affected features are being used.
Regards,
Tim