You forgot the most important and most difficult part. Ensuring transitive dependencies really make their way into the makefile without huge manual effort. For

You forgot the most important and most difficult part. Ensuring transitive dependencies really make their way into the makefile without huge manual effort. For C-like languages just adding an additional #include in a header file will break most makefiles. To solve it you need to generate makefiles using -MMD flags which are included from your main makefile and this is not very obvious. As make was mainly intended to build C projects, not getting these batteries included is why i think parent, and many others, consider makefiles needlessly complex.