[jackewiehose]

> remake --targets; No idea why this hasn't been merged upstream

I would think because it's useless. The targets in a Makefile are very often just internal and aren't always meant to be run by the user.

[rixed]

Many shell autocompleters would read the makefile to complete target names though, suggesting it is not useless.

Anyway, one could always have a 'help' target that prints a short documentation. This also avoid listing internal targets.

[jackewiehose]

Yes, I remember using zsh and in my experience this was barely useful since most Makefiles are auto-generated with hundreds or thousands of targets.

> one could always have a 'help' target that prints a short documentation

Sure, that's fine. But the point is that if you have an unknown Makefile you can't (or shouldn't) just execute it without knowing what it will do. Makefiles should be treated as individual programs just like any other executable and there's no guaranteed standard way to get help from it.

[dima55]

It has an interactive debugger, which is not useless. Clearly.

[jackewiehose]

I was just referring to the --targets option which I thought was meant as an answer to the missing standard help.