True, that's where Make shines. Though given the popularity of so many Make alternatives (the strictly subset of command runner variety, like just[1]) who keep its syntax but not this mechanism, I wonder if for command runner unnecessarily re-running dependencies is really a big deal. Because quite often the tasks are simple and idempotent anyway, and then it's a bit of a hassle to artificially back the target by a dummy file in Make (which your example doesn't do here e.g.).

[1] https://github.com/casey/just

> I wonder if for command runner unnecessarily re-running dependencies is really a big deal.

I've used in in the past with python/django roughly like so (untested from memory, there may be a "last modified" bug in here that still makes something run unnecessarily):

  .PHONY: runserver

  environ:
    python -m venv $@

  environ/lib: requirements | environ
    . environ/bin/activate && pip install -r $<
    touch $@

  runserver: | environ/lib
    . environ/bin/activate && python manage.py runserver [foo]

Setting up these prerequisites takes a while and doing every time you start the dev server would be a pain, but not doing it and forgetting when requirements were updated is also a pain. This would handle both.

What is the | doing in the dependencies?

Specifies order without a hard more-recent-than dependency on everything after the |. So if the timestamp on "environ" is updated, that won't cause the "environ/lib" recipe to run, but if they both have to run then it ensures "environ" happens before "environ/lib".

It might not be necessary for this example, but I've found being more liberal with this feature and manually using "touch" has been more reliable in stopping unnecessary re-runs when the recipe target and dependency are directories instead of just files.

But now put .PHONY everywhere.

I don't think Makefiles are a bad way to go but a bash script is likely more accessible and easily reasoned about in most places.