[nerdponx]

I am a big advocate for and user of this pattern with Make.

However there is one non-trivial downside with (GNU) Make, and that is the non-visibility of env vars set with `export` when running `make -n`. That is, if your Makefile looks like this:

  export FOOBAR=123

  .PHONY: do-it
  do-it:
    ./scripts/do-it

Then `make -n do-it` will not show the exported FOOBAR variable. This makes it somewhat more difficult to audit or inspect with `make -n`.

The output from `make -np` is incredibly verbose and isn't easy to filter with standard CLI tools, which makes this doubly frustrating. You basically need to write an AWK/Perl/Python program to parse it. If there was one feature I'd pay good money to add to a new version of GNU Make, it's an option to emit more-easily machine-readable output from `make -p`, or to ship a script in the GNU Make package that parses it into something standard like JSON or XML.