I used make for several years, but switched to rake and never looked back. Martin Fowler put together a nice article about rake: https://martinfowler.com/arti

I used make for several years, but switched to rake and never looked back. Martin Fowler put together a nice article about rake: https://martinfowler.com/articles/rake.html https://martinfowler.com/articles/rake.html If you deal a lot with artifacts you need to download from random places (ala maven, but with a lot more flexibility), or produce artifacts to various repos, buildr is very nice.