I was one of the folks that mentioned tup in that link. Allow me to take a moment and mention my support for it again. It is an incredibly simple build-system with a ton of advantages over make et al.

I use tup widely across my personal projects and I must say, it has dramatically simplified my dev life.

Oh man I wish I could love tup. That syntax is great, it cleans all by itself, and figures-out dependencies all by it self - even the source file often! But it was a total no-go when I tried on FreeBSD. Basically it does those awesome things by leveraging FUSE and makes all sorts of assumptions about how FUSE operates which are not true on FreeBSD. More over those assumptions would need to change as some of them are bugs and others are honest to goodness differences for good reason. So it boils down to, tup is just too clever sadly.

That's such a bummer! I'm sorry to hear that it doesn't work for FreeBSD! You should consider opening a bug about it; the devs seem pretty open and responsive. Maybe they'll get it fixed for you!