[robryk]

How does !macro rid you of that portability issue? One way or another, you'd need to have a command that does that whole sequence of operations. If it's inline, I'd expect same portability problem (`&&` in Bash corresponds to something else in `.bat`).

[w4rh4wk5]

You are right, glancing over the Man page I thought you could just specify multiple commands. But it doesn't seem like it. So, my problem persists.

[robryk]

What you could do is use Tup's LUA support (you can write tupfiles and tuprules in LUA, and you can define and use LUA functions in them): have each rule handle just one step of your process, generate the whole necessary DAG of rules, encapsulate all of that in a LUA function defined in tuprules.lua and call that function in tupfile.lua for every diagram you want to generate. One thing that you lose is the ability to use `foreach` with your construction (other than by creating a variant of your constructions that embeds foreachness, or by using tup.glob and iterating).

[w4rh4wk5]

I specifically wanted to avoid the LUA support. As soon as we get there I'd rather go with Ruby and Rakefiles.