[strokirk]

Make doesn’t have any builtin —help for the list of user defined targets, and has a slightly wonky bespoke syntax of it’s own. So it’s quite natural to look for something that has those properties.

[crabbone]

But Taskfile didn't improve anything about Make? Make has a huge user base, it's battle-tested in many environments, it has a ton of infrastructure around it...

Taskfile brings nothing to the table. It cannot compete with existing automation tools. It doesn't even promise to be better than existing automation tools...

I mean, give me at least some reason to believe it could be better than what I already have... to me it looks like the people who wrote it simply never saw what's already there. Kind of like a university project where students write a simplistic compiler for a subset of C language... It's nice that they tried their hand, but they have a long way before they actually produce something useful.

[photonthug]

This is the most real criticism of makefiles I've seen in this thread. There's fixes for it, but it usually involves parsing `--print-data-base` output, which is pretty awkward without reaching for a helper language like python/perl/ruby, and that then reduces portability and the batteries-included stuff that makefiles enjoy. It really does need a fix of some kind in make-core.

[monocasa]

At least on debians using bash, tab completion will include the user defined targets.

[silverwind]

Targets can be conditionally defined, so a built-in help may be inaccurate.

[jen20]

Given that targets may be conditionally defined, having built-in documentation of existing targets is _more_ critical - and it should take into account such conditions.