[rgoulter]

File dependencies are useful as part of a build system.

But often tasks are a step removed from that. Targets like "all" and "clean" are good examples of useful tasks to have, even if they're unrelated to files.

A "task runner" isn't intended to replace all of a Makefile's functionality. It takes a common use case of Makefiles, and improves the user experience for this.

I think it's fair to say that it's not a big step up; but it's a definite improvement for what it does aim to do.

[nrclark]

Targets don't need to produce files in Make (see: your examples of 'all' and 'clean'). And non-file targets can depend on other non-file targets. Make does this out of the box, by default.

But if you ever get to a point where you _want_ to express some source-code dependencies (say: pip-install depends on requirements.txt), you can also do that in Make. Just doesn't provide any mechanism for it.