I think what he means is that their Makefiles effectively start having a common API across projects, by having similar target names.

No need to use "all" if you put the default target first (see `default` subsection in the post).

> I'm also intrigued by their claim they used @ in the recipes, yet they never did.

Yea seems that got stripped out.

Still, this is a good practical example for using a Makefile. I'm a fan of this too.

> No need to use "all" if you put the default target first (see `default` subsection in the post).

That's obviously the reason they're doing that, but it's an odd decision. Especially since "all" is a common name for a Makefile target and .DEFAULT_GOAL can be used to override the "first target" convention of Makefiles.

    firsttarget: mysource.txt
        cp $< $@

    .DEFAULT_GOAL=all  # no need to put it first
    .PHONY: all
    all: firsttarget secondtarget

    secondtarget:
        touch $@

As long as running `make` does the Right Thing, does it matter if it does it via an `all` target or by defaulting to a different first target?

I do agree that generally `all` is a common convention, though.

I usually structure my targets so that I can run `make test` immediately without having to know what all the random commands are to build/install.

  $ man make | grep -A2 silent
       -s, --silent, --quiet
            Silent operation; do not print the commands as they are executed.