rake

s a a way to define and evaluate gigantic pure-functional expressions, where each input and output file is a file, and where intermediate sub-expressions can be cached. for an alternative to make that supports 1+2+3+4, see e.g. https://gittup.org/tup/index.html for an alternative to make that supports 1+2+3 but explicitly does not aim to support 4, see e.g. https://ninja-build.org/manual.html another alternative to make that supports 1+2+3+4 but de-emphasizes 3, "targets are files", from the ruby community, is https://github.com/ruby/rake these days in projects it is quite common to see make used to do 1 but not 2, 3 nor 4. i.e. a makefile as a way to define a bunch of imperative shell recipes for named targets, where each named target has no relationship to a file, and dependencies between the targets aren't expressed or relevant. as a random example of this, here's the first google result searching for "makefile terraform": https://github.com/paulRbr/terraform-makefile/blob/master/Ma... note all the targets are ".PHONY" targets, we're telling make to disable the default behaviour where every target corresponds to a file in the file system -- to turn off "3 targets are files in the filesystem". there's very sparing use of dependencies. so this is an example of using makes support for 1 defining recipes to produce targets and a little splash of 2 dependencies between targets, but not 3 nor 4. it looks like this "jeeves" project is aiming at this latter use case, not attempting to implement support for 2+3, the core of how make is typically used as a build tool