Congrats to the GNU Make team.
I still use Make occasionally, but redo (https://github.com/apenwarr/redo) just fits my mind better - it's simple, consistent, doesn't require keeping another language with its dark corners (it's just shell scripts), and works well.
It also solves the bootstrap problem - there's a short script called "do", which always rebuilds everything, all of 177 of non-minified bash script. If you need to distribute anything, you should distribute it with "do" inside - and guarantee that your users can build without relying on an installed package (or a specific version of GNU Make).
p.s: OS/X, Linux and BSD supported. Supposedly, windows through cygwin or busybox - but I've never tried.
In GNU Make 4.0 Releasedapenwarr
redo
Python2010–2023
apenwarr / redo
redo
Smaller, easier, more powerful, and more reliable than make. An implementation of djb's redo.
33Distinct people
42Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
1.9KGitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
Smaller, easier, more powerful, and more reliable than make. An implementation of djb's redo.
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use was verified in the last source check.
What people are saying
No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.
No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.
Also in these discussions
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This week on Hacker News
Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 12:03:30 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year42 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2010-12-14 12:59:14 UTC to 2023-04-25 13:22:40 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2010 | 2010-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2011-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 2 | 1 |
| 2011 | 2011-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 6 | 0 | 6 |
| 2012 | 2012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 1 | 1 |
| 2013 | 2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 5 | 1 | 4 |
| 2014 | 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 7 | 0 | 7 |
| 2015 | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 6 | 0 | 6 |
| 2016 | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 4 | 1 | 3 |
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 1 | 2 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
From the project README
An excerpt from the repository, fetched Nov 13, 2026.
Read the project’s introduction
redo - a recursive build system
Smaller, easier, more powerful, and more reliable than make.
This is an implementation of Daniel J. Bernstein's redo
build system. He never released his
version, so other people have implemented different variants based on his
published specification.
This version, sometimes called apenwarr/redo, is probably the most advanced
one, including parallel builds, improved logging, extensive automated tests,
and helpful debugging features.
To build and test redo, run:
./do -j10 test
To install it, run something like this:
DESTDIR= PREFIX=/usr/local ./do -j10 install
View the documentation via readthedocs.org
Visit the source code on github
Discussions and support via the
mailing list (archives).
You can subscribe by sending any email message to
redo-list+subscribe@googlegroups.com (note the plus sign). You can
send questions or feedback (with or without subscribing) by sending
messages to redo-list@googlegroups.com.
Read the full README on GitHubWhat Hacker News says
5 sourcesBuck sounds a lot like Redo there.
https://github.com/apenwarr/redo
In In quest of the ultimate build toolLike everyone seems to be mentioning this post is really about "you should have automatic builds" and make is just an incidental. redo[1] is another interesting make replacement that keeps most of the good points of make (e.g., simple and shell based), while having a more powerful dependency mechanism. It's even compatible with make itself allowing you to move a part of a recursively built project to redo, while having it call into make for other subcomponents.
What I've done before when doing data-driven blog posts[2][3] was to write the whole analysis end-to-end in ruby, including branching out to R for stats and graphing[4]. I ended up using rake (ruby's make-like tool) to tie everything together with dependency tracking but I could just as well have written a script that would call everything in order. Doing that gives you a way to qu
Read the rest
ickly reproduce results (what's discussed here) but also, together with version management, a way to go back to previous versions and use things like "git bisect" to figure out when you introduced a bug.
[1] https://github.com/apenwarr/redo/
[2] http://pedrocr.pt/text/how-much-gnu-in-gnu-linux
[3] http://pedrocr.pt/text/preliminary-results-open-source-evolu...
[4] https://github.com/pedrocr/codecomp
Smaller, easier, more powerful, and more reliable than make.
1 points · Open discussionDjb redo[1], a make alternative, feels like a good fit for these type of data manipulation and dependency representations. Below is a port of the first example. The build script is just shell, so you can do stuff like embed python with a heredoc. One bit of syntactic sugar is that redo assumes stdout is the desired contents of the generated file, so you don't need to explicitly pipe to an OUTPUT variable.
#!/bin/sh
case $1 in
contracts.csv)
curl http://www.ferc.gov/docs-filing/eqr/soft-tools/sample-csv/contract.txt
;;
evergreens.csv)
redo-ifchange contracts.csv
grep Evergreen contracts.csv
;;
report.txt)
input=evergreens.csv
redo-ifchange $input
python2 <<-EOF
linecount = len(file("$input").readlines())
print("File $input has {0} lines.\n".format(linecount))
EOF
;;
esac
[1] https://gi