Besides performance, I do enjoy the feedback of incremental builds. It's not a huge deal but it's not uncommon that I spot a problem just because the build does

Besides performance, I do enjoy the feedback of incremental builds. It's not a huge deal but it's not uncommon that I spot a problem just because the build doesn't behave in the way I expected. Out of the top of my head: - I forget to add a dependency to the Makefile, I modify said file and notice that `make` doesn't do anything, hinting that something is wrong. If the build system rebuilds everything every time I probably won't notice the problem immediately. - I edit code in a project but run make in the wrong location (because I'm working on two projects at one for instance). Again, make will tell me that there's nothing to do when I make changes. - I run the latest build and it behaves in an unexpected way, I'm thinking that maybe I haven't actually built the last version of the source so the code I'm looking at isn't what's being executed. If I run "make" and I see that it starts rebuilding some artifacts I know that I'm out of date and need to try again. If nothing happens then I need to stop looking for excuse and actually start debugging. - I pull code written by other people (or apply a patch, or unstash old changes). Running make will give me some insight on what parts of the codebase have been impacted. If I see that it's rebuilding something I didn't expect to change it'll probably catch my eye and get me to double check what happened. So I definitely wouldn't trade a Makefile for a shell script, especially since if you build system can easily be replaced by a simple script you'll probably be able to do just fine with a very basic Makefile.