I couldn't agree more. Once upon a time I spent about a week refactoring a really ugly build system (produced a combination of .NET assemblies, C++ libraries,

I couldn't agree more. Once upon a time I spent about a week refactoring a really ugly build system (produced a combination of .NET assemblies, C++ libraries, Java applets, and a hacked version of Apache with bash embedded - don't ask) and got everything just right with this approach, then within a week it was all broken again. I removed the rule-generation from the Makefiles and everything was fine after that. Since then my policy has always been that copy-pasta is OK in the build system, and not to worry about it. (I'm not saying generating the rules from code in a real build system wouldn't be a good idea, jut that it isn't with make.)