&gt;And no build tool matches its wonderful accessibility, since you can just drop arbitrary shell commands in your recipes.<p>Um, yes, there are plenty of build systems that have the flexibility and power of make. And some without the awful warts of make... and some that actually allow for bottom-up dependency declaration.<p>You know, the way that actually makes some sense. But as long as we have people like you giving lip service to make, we&#x27;re stuck with what ships in every base-devel package.