[rwmj]

If anyone's interested, I generalized make to work beyond files (eg: if the tarball doesn't exist on the website already, then it must be uploaded; before uploading, the tarball must have been tested). Also to add parameters to rules, which work a bit like .c.o: rules in make, but fully general with multiple parameters.

To be fair I haven't worked hard to make this very usable, but I do use it myself a lot for all sorts of interesting things:

The tool itself: http://git.annexia.org/?p=goaljobs.git;a=summary

A subset of recipes I use regularly: http://git.annexia.org/?p=goals.git;a=summary