[Somewhat OFFTOPIC]: Alternatives to Make

[Stefan Monnier]

I'm using GNU Make here to keep some generated data files uptodate.

In general, the kind of facility offered by GNU Make fits this purpose
very well, but these files have all kinds of funny characters in their
names (spaces, semi-colons, colons, you name it) and here I bump into
lots and lots of problems with GNU Make
(https://stackoverflow.com/questions/35617602 made it possible to get
closer to the goal, but it's a nightmare to maintain, and I keep having
to add hacks on top of hacks, and with the large number of files
involved the resulting performance is simply not satisfactory).

Is there some alternative to GNU Make people could recommend where these
issues are less painful?

I've found lots of "replacements" that are really thought of as "build
systems" doing all kinds of fun dependency analysis of source code files
and providing great support to handle things like building shared
libraries and stuff, but I need nothing of the sort: I just need a tool
which will look at the existing files and run the shell scripts
I specified to build or update the relevant targets (as I said: from
that point of view Make is spot on).


        Stefan