Hijacking the thread, but a command line option I would really like to have in make is a way to force command echoing, including those prefixed by '@'. It would be the opposite of '-s'. If such a feature already exists, please tell me.

People drive me crazy with Makefiles that hide almost everything, and with no "verbose" option. Sure, it looks nicer when things go right, but when it doesn't, which is the main reason why logs exist, then it is terrible. I always have to use ugly tricks to reveal what the Makefile author has hidden from me, like using the shell "-x" option, or removing all the '@' with a sed command, if would have been so much easier having a command line option.

Good thing we are mostly using cmake now, it has a working VERBOSE flag, but still, manual Makefiles still exist, and they are usually pretty terrible, and that would be a nice option to help debugging these terrible Makefiles (not unlike --shuffle).