This seem downvoted, but I would second the opinion. If you're capable of representing a dependency graph, you should be able to handle the tabs. If `make` does your job and the only problem is the tabs, it's not masochism, just pragmatism.

HN has a pretty strong anti-make bias. People here would much rather use build tools that are restricted to specific languages or not available on most systems. Using some obscure hipster build tool means it's a dependency. Though these people who are used to using language-specific package manager seem to take adding dependencies extremely lightly.