> […] and excessive rebuilds are OK. Where does the presupposition of just some build tools, but not the others (if I am reading it correctly), resulting in ex

> […] and excessive rebuilds are OK. Where does the presupposition of just some build tools, but not the others (if I am reading it correctly), resulting in excessive rebuilds come from? Apart from building a dependencies DAG for a project, the next fundamental responsibility of a build tool is to watch for / detect changed graph nodes and apply relevant build rules (expressed as graph edges) to rebuild only the necessary parts of the graph by traversing the path upward (if the apex node is up at the top). Naturally, if it is a dependency at the very bottom of a very leafy graph that has changed and upstream nodes have a dependency on it, it will trigger a large (of a very large) rebuild of the entire dependency path. But that is true of all build systems, not just select ones, and that is what we need buid tools for. The problem is that many people either can't or don't express dependency rules correctly or dependencies generate build byproducts that are to be dynamically injected into the DAG, and they not properly accounted for in the build rules, and that results in an incorrectly built DAG at the build system run time resulting in excessive rebuilds. In the ideal world, dependency management is relegated to a module system of a programming language. But since long serving incumbents cough cough C, C++ and Java (not until Java 9 anyway) do not have a module system, people have created a kludge (make) and later multiple kludges (autoconf/automake, cmake, maven/ivy etc) to bandaid the problem. However a generic build tool can't account for a permutation of all possible scenarios, all possible programming languages, linkers, pre- and post-processors and whatever else needs to be done to produce a build artefact and excel at it in every possible use case. Some do it better than the others in very specific scenarios but do poorly in some other or fringe use cases. Then there are personal preferences. Therefore, the discourse over which build system is better than the other(s) will never end.