Using make gets quickly really ugly. I wrote many Makefiles in my life and if you have to try to stick to GNU Make. At least it provides some basic functionality. But even that gets nasty quite soon when you need a simple thing like conditions with "and" or "or". If you have to write portable Makefiles ... well fsck.
There were recent discussions about adding GNU Guile to GNU Make. I think this is a brilliant idea. Not only would a major GNU project not only use Guile. But it would make writing Makefiles much more enjoyable because you have a real programming language at hand.
http://www.conifersystems.com/whitepapers/gnu-make/
There were recent discussions about adding GNU Guile to GNU Make. I think this is a brilliant idea. Not only would a major GNU project not only use Guile. But it would make writing Makefiles much more enjoyable because you have a real programming language at hand.