> The frequency with which I find bugs in the dependency graph of `Makefile`s [1][2][3] suggests that people are starting from a sequence of commands anyway Th

> The frequency with which I find bugs in the dependency graph of `Makefile`s [1][2][3] suggests that people are starting from a sequence of commands anyway This is why the more elaborate build systems recognize dependencies automatically. For Makefiles, usually some sub-Makefile is generated automatically and then included. For language-specific build systems like OPAM (OCaml) or Cargo (Rust), this is one of their core features: As a programmer, don't care about maintaining dependency definitions! Whenever a source file is changed, the build system recalculates the relevant part of the dependency graph as well.