@lanodan @Yoruka @ins0mniak Oh, yeah, I mean, you could do a dependency tree in awk. You could possibly translate a makefile into a shell script with sed. mk is nicer, but I don't think that'd be hard to reimplement if you had to. The only trick would be wildcard targets, right, like GNU make has globbing and mk has regex targets. Worst-case, I think the 90-95% case for most makefiles, you implement in a page of Perl.

I read an interview with Bill Joy some years back (and it was decades-old at the time) and someone was asking him what he thought about makefiles and he said that it was the stuff that used to be written down and tacked to the wall next to the machine, so it was good to have it in a file for distribution.