[gchpaco]

Ant and a lot of the build tools that grew up around Ant don't support what make calls pattern rules very well. It's a lot like the difference between using Prolog and C to do the same task. A good example of how this is painful is to try to imagine how difficult it would be to handle the dependencies between various Java source files automatically if <javac> didn't do it for you.

To pick an SNMP related example, since I've done a bunch of that, suppose you have a MIB for your organization (using a hacked private OID that you haven't told anybody about for development, because it's easy) and then a lot of other MIBs that depend on that. And then one bright day you get your IETF approved SNMP OID for your organization, and you need to retarget your MIBs to be under that. It could be as simple as changing the base MIB to the new, official, OID and then letting your build tool rebuild the generated files in the correct dependency order--but that's hard to do with Ant. Usually you'll just rebuild all the generated files and then rebuild all the downstream code and then ... It's not trivial in make but it's not especially difficult--make for example has no real knowledge of C code, but with cc -M it doesn't need any.