The 2 biggest things I find missing in makefiles is the ability to have the "modified date" of a target be something other than the mtime of the target file, an

The 2 biggest things I find missing in makefiles is the ability to have the "modified date" of a target be something other than the mtime of the target file, and for the dependencies of a target to be generated rather than statically specified. The latter there are workarounds for, but not the former. The author's suggestion of "better support for make docker" is completely the wrong thing to do - you don't need to support docker, you need to support mtimes and dependencies in a way that docker could use.