Object-oriented make dependencies

Objects could implement a Target interface with three simple methods:

• boolean isUpToDate()
• void upDate()
• void clean()

The first two are self-explanatory. The third frees any resources the object may have occupied while up-dating. Maybe this method should be dropped and the upDate method should simply free these resources when done. A target might include a set of targets itself depends up-on. In that case the methods above would simply invoke the corresponding methods of the constituent targets. Such a object-oriented dependency mechanism would naturally support the reproducibility commands. To ease the transition, I would love to have Jake, a GNU make implementation in Java.