> But one thing that still annoys me with Make are the workarounds needed to work with stuff which state can not be derived from a file I am not sure about tha

> But one thing that still annoys me with Make are the workarounds needed to work with stuff which state can not be derived from a file I am not sure about that one. I think the reason is that make is not made for general scripting, but it is made for generating a deterministic build product, with minimum time, from a deterministic input (the source files). In that sense, it is something like a "pure function" in functional programming. If you build software, you do not want to depend the result today on your CPU fan's speed, and tomorrow on the moon's phase. In other words, you really try to make the result deterministic. What you certainly can do is to first generate a kind of task file from the current system state (e.g., needs to re-create a test db), and letting redo build these targets. For installing / updating stuff, I do not see problems, but I believe package managers such as guix or nix or pip have more specialized options for this.