> But a lot of people seem to think they need this and (wrongly) assume they can archieve it by simply writing the goals in order. Do they? > Otherwise OP wou

> But a lot of people seem to think they need this and (wrongly) assume they can archieve it by simply writing the goals in order. Do they? > Otherwise OP wouldn't be able to break so many builds with the --shuffle option. That's not what I took away from OPs post. My reading is that a lot of people have goals that they think are independent, but contain hidden dependencies that they'd just not considered. Or, they have goals which have dependencies that were introduced after the makefile was written, and the makefile hasn't caught up yet. i.e. they don't want "build a then b then c", they want "build a and b and c together if that's at all possible (because I have 48 cores and only a single-threaded compiler) but not if it isn't" - and they just haven't correctly specified what should be possible. Having thought a bit more, you could do your original request with the following stanza: d: make a make b make c If that's what they wanted, it's not that hard. Or they could just write a shell script to do a then b then c, instead of using make.