What an excellent piece of documentation on why you should not roll your own build system.<p>"because I can" is right next to the reasons the author gives:<p>"Why don’t you just hack GNU make itself?<p>There are some improvements we’re interested in doing which just aren’t possible within a C codebase:<p><pre><code> * implementing rules directly in Python
* Condensing multiple invocations of make into a single process
</code></pre>
. Python is also about a zillion times easier to hack quickly."<p>What a totally pointless exercise, if anything he should have spent the time to make the build process <i>less</i> dependent on other packages, not more.<p>Same with javas 'ant', why on earth does everybody and their brother feel the need to reinvent the wheel.<p>If you're going to roll out some package try to keep your dependencies to the absolute minimum.