[oinksoft]

Make is the easiest way to map all .foo input files to .bar output files and have the outputs only rebuild when the inputs change. This has a ton of applications outside of C and C++, really anything where the build takes time.

A shell script cannot adequately express task dependencies, or one that did would become a build tool like make. As it stands, make has a very simple and light syntax for expressing dependencies and has remained useful with little modification for quite some time.

Make isn't necessarily the best automation tool, but it's a great build tool.

[ufo]

Not writing task dependencies is kind of a feature though, in a KISS way. One of the reasons I have been tending towards using stupid shell scripts is that its much easier to guarantee that everything is built correctly if you rebuild from scratch everytime. With make I often find myself dealing with bugs in the makefile due to forgetting to specify some dependency or things like that.