diff --git a/Makefile b/Makefile
index 7b5d3015..841136d6 100644
--- a/Makefile
+++ b/Makefile
@@ -1,6 +1,96 @@
-VERSION := $(shell python3 setup.py --version)
-NEXT_VERSION := $(shell expr "$(VERSION)" + 1)
-COMMIT=$(shell git rev-parse HEAD)
+#
+# Maintenance Helpers
+#
+# This makefile contains targets used for development, as well as helpers to
+# aid automatization of maintenance. Unless a target is documented in
+# `make help`, it is not supported and is only meant to be used by developers
+# to aid their daily development work.
+#
+# All supported targets honor the `SRCDIR` variable to find the source-tree.
+# For most unsupported targets, you are expected to have the source-tree as
+# your working directory. To specify a different source-tree, simply override
+# the variable via `SRCDIR=<path>` on the commandline. While you can also
+# override `BUILDDIR`, you are usually expected to have the build output
+# directory as working directory.
+#
+
+BUILDDIR ?= .
+SRCDIR ?= .
+
+#
+# Automatic Variables
+#
+# This section contains a bunch of automatic variables used all over the place.
+# They mostly try to fetch information from the repository sources to avoid
+# hard-coding them in this makefile.
+#
+# Most of the variables here are pre-fetched so they will only ever be
+# evaluated once. This, however, means they are always executed regardless of
+# which target is run.
+#
+#     VERSION:
+#         This evaluates the `version` field of `setup.py`. Therefore, it will
+#         be set to the latest version number of this repository without any
+#         prefix (just a plain number).
+#
+#     COMMIT:
+#         This evaluates to the latest git commit sha. This will not work if
+#         the source is not a git checkout. Hence, this variable is not
+#         pre-fetched but evaluated at time of use.
+#
+
+VERSION := $(shell (cd "$(SRCDIR)" && python3 setup.py --version))
+COMMIT = $(shell (cd "$(SRCDIR)" && git rev-parse HEAD))
+
+#
+# Generic Targets
+#
+# The following is a set of generic targets used across the makefile. The
+# following targets are defined:
+#
+#     help
+#         This target prints all supported targets. It is meant as
+#         documentation of targets we support and might use outside of this
+#         repository.
+#         This is also the default target.
+#
+#     $(BUILDDIR)/
+#     $(BUILDDIR)/%/
+#         This target simply creates the specified directory. It is limited to
+#         the build-dir as a safety measure. Note that this requires you to use
+#         a trailing slash after the directory to not mix it up with regular
+#         files. Lastly, you mostly want this as order-only dependency, since
+#         timestamps on directories do not affect their content.
+#
+
+.PHONY: help
+help:
+	@echo "make [TARGETS...]"
+	@echo
+	@echo "This is the maintenance makefile of osbuild. The following"
+	@echo "targets are available:"
+	@echo
+	@echo "    help:               Print this usage information."
+	@echo "    man:                Generate all man-pages"
+
+$(BUILDDIR)/:
+	mkdir -p "$@"
+
+$(BUILDDIR)/%/:
+	mkdir -p "$@"
+
+#
+# Documentation
+#
+# The following targets build the included documentation. This includes the
+# packaged man-pages, but also all other kinds of documentation that needs to
+# be generated. Note that these targets are relied upon by automatic
+# deployments to our website, as well as package manager scripts.
+#
+
+.PHONY: man
+man:
+	rst2man docs/osbuild.1.rst osbuild.1
 
 #
 # Building packages
@@ -41,11 +131,10 @@ rpm: $(RPM_SPECFILE) $(RPM_TARBALL)
 # Releasing
 #
 
+NEXT_VERSION := $(shell expr "$(VERSION)" + 1)
+
 .PHONY: bump-version
 bump-version:
 	sed -i "s|Version:\(\s*\)$(VERSION)|Version:\1$(NEXT_VERSION)|" osbuild.spec
 	sed -i "s|Release:\(\s*\)[[:digit:]]\+|Release:\11|" osbuild.spec
 	sed -i "s|version=\"$(VERSION)\"|version=\"$(NEXT_VERSION)\"|" setup.py
-
-man:
-	rst2man docs/osbuild.1.rst osbuild.1