This is the most frustrating bit of this weird recursive ecosystem of build tools. No one really uses all of make, so they only clone the bits they need, so their tool is simple and clean and beautiful to a subset of the community that has their same problem. But it can't replace make, so seven months later someone with a slightly different problem shows up with a make replacement, and the circle of life continues.
And you see this on the other side of the problem area too, where large and ugly tools like cmake are trying to do what older large and ugly software like autotools did, and trying to replace make. And they suck too.
I continue to believe the GNU make in the late 80's was and remains a better generic tool than everything in the modern world in all ways but syntax (and in many cases, again c.f. cmake, it had better syntax too). Had the original v7 syntax used something other than tabs, and understood that variable names longer than 1 byte were a good thing, we might never have found ourselves in this mess.
And you see this on the other side of the problem area too, where large and ugly tools like cmake are trying to do what older large and ugly software like autotools did, and trying to replace make. And they suck too.
I continue to believe the GNU make in the late 80's was and remains a better generic tool than everything in the modern world in all ways but syntax (and in many cases, again c.f. cmake, it had better syntax too). Had the original v7 syntax used something other than tabs, and understood that variable names longer than 1 byte were a good thing, we might never have found ourselves in this mess.