what a nice comparison of build tools: Make, Rake, Ant, Gradle

http://hyperpolyglot.org/build

Includes a table listing all their features and showing how the others deal with it.

Make allows you to insert a dash between the tab and before the statement in order to ignore that statement's exit code. The other build tools do not have that feature.

"rake", the ruby DSL, improved

Well, I started using rake instead of make in 2007, when I got ruby infected. I noticed then, that rake's output is a little "dis-arranged" (the entire "command" came printed in  one single line). That changed in the meantime, at least now with 0.8.7 it is just the way I like it. Thank you to the developers!