[jbki1121]

if it makes any difference, I was referring to C, for which Make is the majority, I think - could be wrong, though, since I'm not a c developer.

But to the point, I'm not sure if the code at issue would be considered minutiae or not, but I believe that the more curious you are, the more you tend to dig into the details, and a person doing this over many years would attain a rich knowledge-base spanning depth and breadth. I know as a java developer that I've referred innumerable times the docs for the POM and settings structure in order to explore the limits of customizing my build, which would include the rather obscure features. Not saying this is technically comparable to meta tags in html, but maybe that's what the author was going for.