> the makefile syntax which was designed specifically for the purpose?

and proven by generations of programmers.

the (very sad) problem here is that for some people makefile is not trendy, it is something first released 42 years ago.

As someone who's been using makefiles for about 30 of those years, I have to say make sucks. It's barely evolved at all. There is a reason there are so many alternatives to it, and it's not be because it's trendy. I mean, you can't even copy a file with it. That takes an external program.

it does. unfortunately its still the one i reach for because it never seems like a good time to research alternatives.

generally the tools that are optimized to make the common case easy aren't so useful to me because i often have alot of intermediate build artifacts/stages.

and i really like the declarative nature of make..just not all the fragility and warts.

does anyone have any suggestions for a nice general declarative alternative?

> I often have a lot of intermediate build artifacts/stages

I don't know your use case in depth, but I don't see why Task wouldn't work for you, since it's similar to Make in this regard.

You can have multiple tasks (for each step) and then either set dependencies or have a task that call all other tasks in the right sequence. And, of course, you'd have to enable [this](https://taskfile.org/#/usage?id=prevent-unnecessary-work).

Anyway, seems that Make is already enough for you, since you're used to it's quirks.

It's not solely about syntax.

Have you tried using Make on Windows? I know, I also prefer Unix-like systems over Windows (and I barely use Windows these days anymore), but for those that need Windows support, it's a miserable experience trying to use tools that barely work there.

Checksum based (instead of timestamp based) up-to-date resolution is also nice. Etc, etc.

In short, I don't think Task is perfect (far from it), but we desperately need better alternatives to Make.