Arara: the cool TeX automation tool

For the curious, here's a nice introduction to arara

http://uktug.tug.org/TUGboat/tb39-2/tb122cereda-arara.pdf

And here's the manual

Hm. So it's a build system intended for TeX files? What does it gain you over using a Makefile or similar build system?

this was much more informative than the website!

Can't help but wonder what kind of edge cases necessitated this over the venerable latexmk

I assume some people like the idea of being more in control, in the sense of having the exact recipe for compilation explicitly specified. Some people might also find tectonic [0] as a nice compiler backend. From my experience, latexmk [1] has orked very well for all my LaTeX projects, and I've never looked back.

[0]: https://tectonic-typesetting.github.io/

[1]: https://www.ctan.org/pkg/latexmk/

Any example of a setup?