I spent a lot of time exploring make replacements a while back. I really like Tup as a "update outputs based on inputs" system. A lot of people get hungup on it though because there are things that make can do that Tup can't, as Tup is much more of a special-purpose tool than Make.

"make install" for example is specifically something Tup can't do.

This is trivially solved by having "install.sh"

There are also various limitations, caveats, &c. such that I typically had a "build.sh" or some-such that did any necessary pre-tup work.

The most restrictive rule is the set of output pathnames cannot depend on the contents of input files; they must be fully realizable from just the set of input pathnames. Calculating this outside of tup is fine even if it's expensive, as long as it changes rarely. Tup will error if the list is wrong, so you can't accidentally build with out-of-date outputs.