Order-only prerequisites are needed whenever your rules depend on existence of some directories. So directories become make goals too in a sense. Obviously it's

Order-only prerequisites are needed whenever your rules depend on existence of some directories. So directories become make goals too in a sense. Obviously it's way too tedious to write all that by hand. You can have some sort of high-level js.mk scattered in each directory of your project, then there's a top level Makefile which will include all those js.mk files and expand them from high level definitions to make rules. Make is good only if you create a sort of framework around for your domain. However the learning curve is way too steep. I would only attempt to use make if Gulp does its job horribly bad.