[maccard]

At that point you end up with a makefile that has a 1:1 mapping with targets in my experience. At a previous job, we had an enormous makefile, most of which was defining phone targets and translating make arguments into maven arguments. All the actual targets were calling maven. Make provided no value at all in that, other than requiring you to know Make and maven to modify anything in the build.

Personally I’d rather a shell script for a command runner in most cases

[drowsspa]

Yeah, mine often just defers back to some shell scripts. But it's useful to enumerate them in the Makefile.

[tom_]

If you have a telltale prefix for any internal phony targets (I use "_"), then you can have the Makefile list all the interesting targets itself. Cat the Makefile, print every line matching "^\.PHONY:[[:space:]]*[^_]", then strip out the prefix. Leave any suffix, as you can put a trailing comment in, e.g.,

    .PHONY:build_windows # build for Windows. Supply DEBUG=1 for a debug build

I find this super useful. Even if you remember exactly what the target was called, it still gives you a nice list of words you can double click on to pull into the command line.