Closest in spirit to make, and does essentially all you want to do is "redo", concept drafter by djb, implemented independently by apenwarr[0] and by others. ap

Closest in spirit to make, and does essentially all you want to do is "redo", concept drafter by djb, implemented independently by apenwarr[0] and by others. apenwarr's version has a super short "do" script (a couple of hundred lines of portable sh IIRC) which uses the same configuration but does a full rebuild each time. The two weak points are: (1) multiple outputs from a compilation step (yytab.c yytab.h from yacc) is not properly supported, and (2) no windows support. Other than that it's the perfect minimalistic make replacement -- what make should have been. Additionally, there tup[1]. With some assumptions about the build process that usually hold in non-distributed builds, it is the fastest, simplest make replacement; You just write a list of commands that builds your final outputs, and by tracing the processes it figures out exactly what needs to be done next time -- nothing more, and nothing less. [0] https://github.com/apenwarr/redo https://github.com/apenwarr/redo [1] http://gittup.org/tup/ http://gittup.org/tup/