Comment by chubot

Make is not a general purpose parallel DAG engine. It works well enough for small C projects and similar, but for problems of even medium complexity, it falls down HARD

Many years ago, I wrote 3 makefiles from scratch as an exploration of this (and I still use them). I described the issues here: https://lobste.rs/s/yd7mzj/developing_our_position_on_ai#c_s...

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The better style is in a sibling reply -- invoke Make from shell, WHEN you have a problem that fits Make.

That is, the "main" should be shell, not Make. (And it's easy to write a dispatcher to different shell functions, with "$@", sometimes called a "task file" )

In general, a project's CI does not fit entirely into Make. For example, the CI for https://oils.pub/ is 4K lines of shell, and minimal YAML (portable to Github Actions and sourcehut).

https://oils.pub/release/latest/pub/metrics.wwz/line-counts/...

It invokes Make in a couple places, but I plan to get rid of all the Make in favor of Python/Ninja.