Neither make nor any of its alternatives or improvements get header files completely right. This is because compilers simply do not emit all of the information

Neither make nor any of its alternatives or improvements get header files completely right. This is because compilers simply do not emit all of the information. A build tool not only has to know about the header files found, to monitor them for changes, but also has to know about the places where header files were not found, to monitor for files suddenly appearing there. I wrote a C++ preprocessor that would spit out both sets of information, for use with redo, but I've never published it. Without this information things can end up not being re-built correctly in a number of cases that one can encounter in practice.