I think you are missing a fundamental feature of what makes Make special, which is how it handles dependencies. It uses file timestamps to decide what to do and especially what things to skip because they don't need to be done. All those .make.* files serve a purpose, as Make will compare the timestamp of those files to the prerequisite files (source files) and only run the shell scripts if they are outdated (in the process recreating the target with an updated timestamp). So if I didn't change any of the source files, there is no need to lint or test again, since nothing changed, there can be no different result. Same goes for installing requirements (a lengthy task). If the requirements files don't change, nothing needs to be reinstalled. But if I pull in new changes from a colleague with an updated requirements files, running any Make target that has a dependency on those requirements will run the scripts to update them without me having to think about it.

I know how make works. I really only looked at .make.test because it has a pretty glaring bug in it and assumed the rest of the . targets you have have similar issues. I think actually it may be the only one with this issue. Here's the issue:

By depending on ${pysrc} which is set above with `pysrc = $(shell find ${pysrcdirs} -name *.py)` you ignore the possibility that a file may be removed. This would happen in a bisect for example or if someone were to manually delete a file. This will prevent tests from running.

I think the bigger issue with your makefile is that there's about 5 targets in total which actually make use of any of make's features, and a lot of targets which make incorrect assumptions about how make works.

Here's a list of targets which appear to not use any of make's features at all (and no, depending on ${app} being set up before they are ran does not constitute using make's features): audit, run_no_backend, run-frontend, run-nonlocal-frontend, app, run-worker, run-broker, testcase, test_integration, test_system, test_datasets, test_deterministic, test_mysql, test_postgres, clean, clean_virtualenv, mrproper, pip-sync, _mark_outdated, _commit_update, ${python} ${pip}.

Moreover, here's an example of a target with fundamental issues:

update_requirements: _mark_outdated requirements.txt requirements-dev.txt requirements-deploy.txt _commit_update

This is just plain wrong. You're treating make dependencies as some kind of sequential list of commands. That's not how make works. If I was running this with make -j or a gnu make implementation with by-default nondeterministic target build order choice this would just break.

I'm not saying your makefile saves zero purpose. There's a few targets there which you should keep. But it should really be 90% shorter with all the removed bits in a shell script so that you're not relying on nuances of your particular version of GNU make to make it work.