A particular purpose... can it be done?

[Nathanael Nerode]

I'm trying to get some particular information out of a Makefile.
1. Given a target file, is there a rule to remake it?
2. Given a target file, is it a dependency of anything, or not?

There seems to be no easy way to do this.  The best way I've found 
involves running 'make target -n' and grepping the output for particular 
strings, but this is both slow and fragile.  What I really want is an 
option a la 'make --info target' which would return a useful exit status
reflecting such information, or a message which is guaranteed not to 
change over versions.

The reason I can't just grep through the Makefile is that I'd have to 
replicate Make's entire macro/variable facility, which seems highly 
undesirable.

Is there such an option?  If not, I would expect it would not be too 
hard to add, but I don't understand the internal C code of gnu make 
quite well enough to do it myself.

Ideally, I'd also like to be able to extract a list of all 'leaf' nodes 
in the dependency tree, and a list of all direct dependencies of a given 
target, but those might be harder.

Perhaps the simplest scheme from my point of view would be an option 
--print-dependencies, similar to -n, which prints out the direct 
dependencies of the specified target (rather than checking to see if 
they're up to date); nothing if there's no such target.  I could 
leverage this to generate everything I want.

Please reply to me if you have any thoughts, since I'm not subscribed.
--Nathanael Nerode