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[bug #64571] Add option to print targets


From: Paul D. Smith
Subject: [bug #64571] Add option to print targets
Date: Sun, 7 Jan 2024 12:39:38 -0500 (EST)

Follow-up Comment #8, bug#64571 (group make):

Let me just say up-front that my biggest concern with this is going in the
direction you suggest:

> I guess you can always add flags to refine the behaviour later if necessary

Just... no.  I won't introduce an entire family of options that tweak and
customize this output in various ways.

If someone feels the need for this level of customization then I think the
only way forward is to introduce a kind of "format syntax" that will allow
users to provide customized output (a well-known example of this is Git's "git
log --format" option but there are many examples that predate it).  Ideally
this syntax would be sufficient to generate, for example, the current print
database output (a default syntax), and allow users to change it.  This would
be quite a bit of work and I don't plan to work on it, but if someone else
wants to please provide a proposal on bug-make@gnu.org and we can discuss the
details.

Given the parameters laid out (used to generate targets for command-line
completion) it seems like:
* We definitely want to print targets with no recipe (all: often, for
example)
* We definitely want to print phony targets
* We don't want to perform recursion into sub-makes, or any other "normal"
recipes

In addition it seems like we would also want the following:
* Don't show builtin targets (these are basically suffix rules)
* Don't show special targets like .PHONY, .SILENT, .PRECIOUS, etc.

The big open question is what to do about remaking makefiles (
https://www.gnu.org/software/make/manual/html_node/Remaking-Makefiles.html ). 
If we do not do this then in some situations some targets which you _could_
build, will not show up in the list (because they are defined in a makefile
that will be remade but was not).  But if we DO do this then the output
generated by make will first be any output created when remaking makefiles,
followed by the list of targets, which would mess up any utility trying to
parse the output.


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