Another vote for Fabricate; here's a comment of mine from a while back explaining in detail why I prefer it (or Tup) to Make.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4190804

I use it on Windows too with an strace replacement I wrote which isn't online but if anyone's interested then just ask.

Thanks for the tip on fabricate, it appears to be just the tool I was looking for. A light weight dependency based "build" system in python that is not focused on distutils or making python packages. We shall see how well it works for data processing.

'Drake' for that use was on here too, not too long ago. http://blog.factual.com/introducing-drake-a-kind-of-make-for...