Because task runners come from the lineage of build systems, I (previously) would have thought that smart management of dependencies was a critical feature, esp

Because task runners come from the lineage of build systems, I (previously) would have thought that smart management of dependencies was a critical feature, especially skipping outputs whose inputs haven't changed, so that tasks can be run efficiently. Make and rake both do this. But I guess, enough of the time, what people want is just a nice tidy way of organising tasks to run. Not drastically different to a set of shell scripts, but organised differently, with a few extra features and less boilerplate per task.