Make is a powerful tool for managing compiling and other complex procedures. It is also a great tool for building pipelines. However due to its cryptic syntax Makefiles can be really hard to maintain. Here come Yakefiles: their format is a subset of YAML, so that it's easy to write, to read and to maintain them.
Yake is a tool which parses Yakefiles producing corresponding Makefiles, thus it wraps the existing and well-tested technology making the experience with the code more pleasant. It also means portability, since Make is widely used on UNIX systems. Yake is a lightweight, simple and open-source tool with just a few necessary options. Though rather stable, it is currently in alpha.
TBD
First of all, make yourself familiar with YAML syntax: here is the specification, Wikipedia article and a few tutorials.
Now that you understand YAML files, let's build a basic pipeline.
yake --rule-titles pipeline.yake