On Fri, Apr 08 2022, Taylor Blau wrote: > On Fri, Apr 08, 2022 at 07:45:24AM +0000, Elia Pinto wrote: >> Add a help target to the Makefile to be able to run make help, in the same way >> does the Makefiles self-generated by some build systems. >> >> The target list has been statically extracted from the git Makefile with a >> script and the results have been filtered in an essentially arbitrary way to >> leave the ones that i imagines most interesting and frequent for a developer. > > I could definitely see something like "make help" being helpful, since > make itself doesn't have a convenient way to list all of a Makefile's > targets. > > I worry about this list getting stale, though. If we add a new target, > will we remember to update the "help" list here? It would be nice if we > could dynamically generate this list, but I think that loses out on the > filtering you've done here. There's some nice suggestions at: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4219255/how-do-you-get-the-list-of-targets-in-a-makefile I managed to get pretty close to this by massaging the various parsers that were suggested there. But I wonder if defining help as we go along wouldn't be the best and least likely to break, and most likely to be kept up-to-date. I.e. some variant of the comments added there. Or better (maybe it's discussed in that SO thing, I didn't skim it all), something like: HELP_all = the default target all:: [...] We could then even print a heading showing what target(s) we're running by looking at MAKECMDGOALS. Also, Elia's ad-hoc script here copied from StackOverflow looks awfully similar to what I have in /usr/share/bash-completion/completions/make installed with my OS. Available here: https://github.com/scop/bash-completion/blob/master/completions/make So maybe we could just make this an optional target that depended on that widely-available bash completion? That would also have the nice benefit that to the extent that the output sucked we could maybe massage our Makefile a bit to make it better, and then we'd not only benefit "make help" users, but anyone doing "make <TAB>".
