Okay, except your whole reply to OP started by replying someone who is in this situation and does have this exact problem. Then you go and ask why their solutio

Okay, except your whole reply to OP started by replying someone who is in this situation and does have this exact problem. Then you go and ask why their solution can't be simple, and when it's explained why, you say, "well, most people don't need this?" ?????? You're talking to people who do need this! And this isn't something that ultra-massive billion line projects singularly suffer from. You can easily suffer from all these issues and more in small and big software projects alike. I've suffered from these problems plenty in FOSS and commercial software that were small and large. "Computer program that generates another computer program" is actually a pretty normal and fine way to build software. But when compilation is expensive, these things matter, and you can't keep making excuses about it. A build system should accurately track dependencies and rebuild things. It's that simple. You can say that running two commands is OK or whatever, but don't try to imply that people who want that criteria -- accurate deps and rebuilding -- aren't trying to solve problems they actually have, and then ditch the example when it becomes inconvenient to you that they are.