Comment by o11c

Definitely interesting, but it's flat-out wrong about the limitations of `make`.

In particular, the `release.txt` task is trivial by adding a dummy rule to generate and include dependencies; see https://www.gnu.org/software/make/manual/html_node/Remaking-... (be sure to add empty rules to handle the case of deleted dynamic dependencies). You can use hashes instead of file modification times by adding a different kind of dummy rule. The only downside is that you have to think about the performance a little.

I imagine it's possible for a project to have some kind of dynamic dependencies that GNU make can't handle, but I dare say that any such dependency tree is hard to understand for humans too, and thus should be avoided regardless. By contrast, in many other build tools it is impossible to handle some of the things that are trivial in `make`.

(if you're not using GNU make, you are the problem; do not blame `make`)