[dmckeon]

To avoid the implicits:

  make --no-builtin-rules --no-builtin-variables

at least as of: GNU Make 3.82

I think that at this point, with 37-some years worth of Makefiles on the planet, a competitive replacement for make with a different syntax or format would need to provide tools to process or translate old & new formats to the other format, as Perl did with the (uni-directional) a2p and s2p tools for awk and sed scripts, so that people considering a transition could make the leap more easily and with greater confidence.

[agumonkey]

hehe seems like I didn't RTF-make-M deep enough. Indeed a migration plan would be of immense value. But I fear more than syntax, it's make semantics that would hurt this plan, since AFAIK it has non trivial scopes for variables. Complex makefiles translation might prove intractable.