make is scary because people use autogenerated Makefiles. After you've tried to naïvely read a Makefile for a medium-sized C project you'll never want to write

make is scary because people use autogenerated Makefiles. After you've tried to naïvely read a Makefile for a medium-sized C project you'll never want to write a Makefile yourself. That said, there's no tool that works so simply and so beautifully as make when you have a lot of build steps that generate lots of intermediate files with complex dependency links between them. That situation may happen everywhere, even if you're generating a bunch of PDFs or rendering HTML templates or making images from .dot files or whatever. Use make. Or is there an alternative tool for these situations also?