Agree on implicit behavior. Actually I think it's fine for the implicit automatic features to exist, I just think no one should use them in most cases. It's f

Agree on implicit behavior. Actually I think it's fine for the implicit automatic features to exist, I just think no one should use them in most cases. It's fine for a tool to try to be as magic as possible, as an optional thing you can do whaen you decide you want. And for practically any makefile that you are bothering to actually write into a file that you are keeping and running again tomorrow, and giving to someone else to run some other day on some other machine... everything should be explicit. Just like the projects code, it's documentation as much as function, and no part of either the documentation or the function should be left unexplained and undetermined. But that's a seperate issue from the tool having the ability. I think it's not a tools job to tell me what I want and why and what is and is not valid. If make never had the magic features, I would not miss them feel any need to invest in adding them, but if they are there anyway somehow, I also don't see any reason to remove them or create a new tool just to have something that doesn't have them. I should be free to write a short super convenient fully magic 3-line makefile that just says "do the likely thing with whatever is in this directory", and at the same time, no project should ever have that as their real makefile. Both stances are valid at the same time, I think.