>Which means it can be faster. If you need to be able to write a file, but have the build system recognize that the new one is the same as the old; this can be

>Which means it can be faster. If you need to be able to write a file, but have the build system recognize that the new one is the same as the old; this can be accomplished with a simple `sponge`-like script that only writes the file if the new version is different than the old. (I like to call the script write-ifchanged) > If you don't tell it to, no it doesn't. You can easily combine the above write-ifchanged with the technique described in the article to declare dependencies on variable values. You can make Make do a lot of things with enough hacking, but the defaults matter. The majority of projects that use make don't bother. Meaning you need a 'make clean; make' if you change compiler flags. > Which means that it works with NFS, doesn't have race conditions involving renaming directories, ... It has plenty of race conditions without that: if you change a header file in the middle of a make run, it will happily continue without warning. A lot of Make's design decisions make sense given its history. Given its ubiquity it's also the best choice for a lot of projects. That doesn't mean it's perfect.