[zokier]

The "Simple Makefile for Python projects" exemplifies why I dislike (ab)using make. It doesn't actually track deps properly, so venv doesn't get updated if requirements.txt changes, and nor does the dependency change tracking work properly for test target. To make it more correct you'd need bunch of .stamp files and/or globs, and even then it might be iffy. For lots of uses the simple file mtime based change/dep tracking is just too crude, and phony targets are largely an antipattern.

For script-running just is great, for full dep tracking build tool something like buck2 is an improvement.

The one place where make shines is when your workflow is truly file-based, so all steps can really be described as some variations of "transform file A to file B".

[nrclark]

My team uses Make to handle the top-level scripting for a Python development project, and it works great. It was pretty easy to set up the correct dependency relationships.

Make is a powerful tool. You just have to understand how it thinks about the world, and adjust your own thinking a bit if needed.

If you just want to have tasks that depend on other tasks, you don't need stamps, phony, or anything else.

But what happens when you want to say "only rebuild my venv if requirements.txt changed"? that's a file dependency that you can reasonably express between requirements.txt and venv/bin/activate. And then all of a sudden, you're squarely in Make's wheelhouse.