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I just write (gnu) makefiles for my projects these days and invoke pkg-config to detect libraries and features. It's easy for me because I've been doing it this way for decades. But there are way too many footguns for me to recommend it to new developers (although I'm not sure what I would recommend instead either).

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I think Make is exactly what you want, and I do recommend it to everybody, since the default alternative is usually something heinous like CMake which isn't really an improvement. You want the bit of logic to create a "build system" out of Make abstracted into a library, and then it's perfect. I use this: https://github.com/dkogan/mrbuild/ but there're many other ways to do it

What I want is a DAG, but with better syntax than make.

The closest I have come to ideal is a custom ninja build file generator, which is pretty simple. It's been easier for other people to maintain than make or even rake.

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