tqdm implements in its setup.py a system simulating make and Makefiles in order to ease maintenance (running unit tests, building, uploading to pypi, etc.).

This system might interest other Python developers. Also, it isn't really related to tqdm per se, so I'm not sure it should be included inside the project.

Therefore, this system should be modularized into its own project pyMakefile (or another name?). The idea would be to monkeypatch distutils or setuptools, like setuptools does with distutils with a simple import setuptools. In the end, to enable pyMakefile, one should only prepend this in its own setup.py:

import distutils
import setuptools
import pymakefile

Then, pyMakefile will automatically monkeypatch distutils/setuptools to add the command python setup.py make.

Personal note, I think this project might have the potential of being eventually merged into the standard Python lib, if it gets enough traction by Python developers.