Why must Makefile commands use `: ##`

[ericcornelissen]

Hey, awesome idea for a VSCode extension, I just have one small "problem" which is that it doesn't recognize my commands sometimes because the extension requires commands to have : ## (with exactly one space). I'm not a Makefile expert but as far as I know this is not required, just a common practice.

Would it be an idea to make this format optional, perhaps the parser can be configurable 100%? Or the "condition" for a line being a command it can boiled down to something like:

if (/^[a-z]+:($|[^=])/.match(line)) { ... }

[Akecel]

Hey! Thanks for your suggestion! 😄

Indeed, the use of " ##" is a good practice to indicate a description to a command, which can be used when using a help command for example, so it also helps to parse the makefile.

.PHONY: help
help: ## Provides help information on available commands.
	@printf "Usage: make <command>\n\n"
	@printf "Commands:\n"
	@awk -F ':(.*)## ' '/^[a-zA-Z0-9%\\\/_.-]+:(.*)##/ { \
	  printf "  \033[36m%-30s\033[0m %s\n", $$1, $$NF \
	}' $(MAKEFILE_LIST)

I'll study your proposal to open the use of the extension without the need of this.

[ericcornelissen]

Cool, that's a really useful script that I'm going to start using! Given that script I would at least recommend to update the current condition to see if something is a command or not to match the regular expression in that script, i.e. something like:

if (/^[a-zA-Z0-9%\\\/_.-]+:(.*)##/.match(line)) { ... }

Or without the ## if you're fine allowing Makefiles to omit it:

if (/^[a-zA-Z0-9%\\\/_.-]+:/.match(line)) { ... }

[zenopopovici]

I second this. It is not useful with a comment requirement.

[tinder-tannerbennett]

There are several thigng wrong with this. For starters, also ignores the fact that you can have commands like this:

.PHONY: helloworld
helloworld: echo Hello
helloworld: echo World!

So, helloworld is going to appear twice if you're not doing any uniquing of commands.

Secondly, I think .PHONY would appear here as well, but that's not a command, it's a directive of sorts

@Akecel Could you please address this so I don't have to fork your extension and republish it?

[Akecel]

@tinder-tannerbennett

I have taken note of your recommendations. I will try to look and see what I can do, I often lack the time to take care of these issues, but I have to get on with it 😅

On the other hand, if you want to open a Pull Request with changes to collaborate on this repo, I would be happy to merge it and publish an update 😉

[JeremyCaron]

I've posted a PR to propose a change to makefile parsing around this that will allow for the display of commands without comments: #19