[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.