thanks -- I was under the initial impression that you intended jeeves as a "pythonic make". make isn't a command runner at all. Indeed, it relies on sh for that. It determines the DAG required to bring components up to date wrt dependencies. For example, you may have a postscript file and a pdf. Edit the postscript and you want the pdf regenerated:

my.pdf: my.ps

<tab> command to convert my.pdf to my.ps

Make makes no attempt to generate scripts, or anything like that. In general, make uses file timestamps to determine that my.pdf is out of date with respect to my.ps Make does have default commands that it can use. For example, it knows that executable w can be generated from w.c If I have a directory that contains w.c I can:

make w

cc w.c -o w

Now, because w exists, and is newer than w.c doing make w again does nothing!

make w

make: 'w' is up to date

I don't think that is what jeeves is?