Hacker News Reader

I wouldn't necessarily agree. I've seen may instances of Make particularly being used to run tedious commands — linting, testing, deployment, et cetera; for these things, jeeves can be a perfect replacement. A and B are usually called alternatives if they have an intersection in their feature sets; there are no perfect alternatives.

View on HN

That make can be used to run commands that don't build anything is just an artifact of how targets work.

If something is marketed as a make alternative, most people would expect it to, at the very least, possess make's core feature, which is skipping targets that have already been built and whose inputs haven't changed. That's what makes something a build system and not just a command runner.

The fundamental feature of make is building a graph of dependencies and building only the files that need building.

I say this as somebody that built their own python replacement for make long ago - during the building of which I learned what make was actually for, and how to use make, and thus abandoned my own project.

[1]: https://github.com/llimllib/pub

Reply on news.ycombinator.com