Once upon a time, you could roll your own of this using `tup` which might have my favorite "how it works" in the readme:<p><i>How is it so awesome?</i><p><i>In a typical build system, the dependency arrows go down. Although this is the way they would naturally go due to gravity, it is unfortunately also where the enemy's gate is. This makes it very inefficient and unfriendly. In tup, the arrows go up. This is obviously true because it rhymes. See how the dependencies differ in make and tup:</i><p><i>[ Make vs. Tup ]</i><p><i>See the difference? The arrows go up. This makes it very fast.</i><p><a href="https://gittup.org/tup/" rel="nofollow">https://gittup.org/tup/</a><p>Also has a whitepaper: <a href="https://gittup.org/tup/build_system_rules_and_algorithms.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://gittup.org/tup/build_system_rules_and_algorithms.pdf</a>
I looked at this and I was heavily inspired by it in terms of thought process when going through the process of looking at DAG like representation of pipelines. Nowadays there is stuff like Dagger, Dagster, Terragrunt that are more evolved forms of what this is doing, from different angles. I think it could be a good option for someone who wanted something dead simple with a very low dependency footprint though as it’s mostly just a bunch of wired up bash.