> When make was written most machines would have just exploded at the sight of a typical build.xml, and downloading tens or hundreds of packages from anywhere was simply out of the question.
Sure. But the notion of doing things declaratively existed (Prolog predates make by five years). And the biggest difference between make and the scripts that preceded it is that it's more structured, with a graph of targets rather than just a list of commands.
If you add the ability to reuse libraries of targets (something that sort-of exists via implicit make rules), restrict targets to something a little more structured than random shell commands, and - yes - add the ability to fetch dependencies (including target definitions) from a repository, you end up with something very like maven.
Sure. But the notion of doing things declaratively existed (Prolog predates make by five years). And the biggest difference between make and the scripts that preceded it is that it's more structured, with a graph of targets rather than just a list of commands.
If you add the ability to reuse libraries of targets (something that sort-of exists via implicit make rules), restrict targets to something a little more structured than random shell commands, and - yes - add the ability to fetch dependencies (including target definitions) from a repository, you end up with something very like maven.