I'm baffled at the amount of debate in this thread. Make is good for tasks that can be expressed as a directed acyclic graph of steps, where the steps' inputs a

I'm baffled at the amount of debate in this thread. Make is good for tasks that can be expressed as a directed acyclic graph of steps, where the steps' inputs and outputs are files, and steps can be expressed in a few lines of shell script. It works pretty well for such tasks in my opinion. Yes, it will look contorted for tasks that don't fit this model.