Looking at the --print-data-base output more I notice it gives reports on the results of recipe execution, so it looks like it necessarily comes after normal execution and the option description should be changed.
The suggestion to "use make -p -f/dev/null" is also problematic: as you would expect it also appears to cause the Makefile of interest to not get used, so it's only useful for looking at built-in rules, variables etc. It seems like --dry-run might be a more useful suggestion. However --dry-run can change the output of --print-data-base itself slightly: in case of a failing target recipe --print-data-base --dry-run (wrongly) says "# Successfully updated.". Britton
