Follow-up Comment #8, bug#64571 (group make): Let me just say up-front that my biggest concern with this is going in the direction you suggest:
> I guess you can always add flags to refine the behaviour later if necessary Just... no. I won't introduce an entire family of options that tweak and customize this output in various ways. If someone feels the need for this level of customization then I think the only way forward is to introduce a kind of "format syntax" that will allow users to provide customized output (a well-known example of this is Git's "git log --format" option but there are many examples that predate it). Ideally this syntax would be sufficient to generate, for example, the current print database output (a default syntax), and allow users to change it. This would be quite a bit of work and I don't plan to work on it, but if someone else wants to please provide a proposal on bug-make@gnu.org and we can discuss the details. Given the parameters laid out (used to generate targets for command-line completion) it seems like: * We definitely want to print targets with no recipe (all: often, for example) * We definitely want to print phony targets * We don't want to perform recursion into sub-makes, or any other "normal" recipes In addition it seems like we would also want the following: * Don't show builtin targets (these are basically suffix rules) * Don't show special targets like .PHONY, .SILENT, .PRECIOUS, etc. The big open question is what to do about remaking makefiles ( https://www.gnu.org/software/make/manual/html_node/Remaking-Makefiles.html ). If we do not do this then in some situations some targets which you _could_ build, will not show up in the list (because they are defined in a makefile that will be remade but was not). But if we DO do this then the output generated by make will first be any output created when remaking makefiles, followed by the list of targets, which would mess up any utility trying to parse the output. _______________________________________________________ Reply to this item at: <https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?64571> _______________________________________________ Message sent via Savannah https://savannah.gnu.org/
