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I agree, and recommend Biomake:

It uses the declarative programming language Prolog to write flexible rules.

A logic programming language like Prolog is very well suited for expressing rule-based dependencies.

I've come to the same conclusion after many years of writing and modifying build scripts for Java, .NET, Ruby, JavaScript and C.

Of course, if you only care about POSIX, a lot of the make issues go away. Not all, but many.

Gradle is pretty much like this I think, although it's still a bit too tied to the Java build flow to be truly general purpose.

Sounds like you may want something like Scons with better support for common build patterns.

Something more along those lines, yes, although I'm really not that convinced about some of their design decisions and though the documentation is at least very detailed, it's rather obtuse.

I think it's possible to do better.