bad title; shellscripts have nothing to do with it. the project's tagline would be better:
Sake: A self-documenting build automation tool
For something that _is_ like Make, but with shell scripts see shmake from Steve Donovan http://steved-imaginaryreal.blogspot.co.uk/2015/05/shmake-sh...
apenwarr's implementation of djb redo[1] contains a minimal, shell implementation of redo in its `minimal/` subdirectory.
It seems like the downside to using redo would be that there are .do files sitting throughout the source tree. It'd be nice if there was a way to consolidate several .do files into a single Redofile, similar to a Makefile or Sakefile.
Like the non-minimal redo, sake is also implemented in Python. I wonder how they compare, performance-wise.