Re -MMD: without automated dependency discovery, make was half a tool: if a dependency was omitted, it might do a less-than minimal job of rebuilding, introducing regressions into the build output that did not exist in the source. For this reason, make was quite often used in an unconditional manner, and if you are doing that, you can get the same result more simply and clearly (and without surprises) with a procedural shell script. It is surprising how long it took for that gap in capabilities to be closed.