I don't know about out-of-source building, but I know Make has a bunch of built-in rules that you can use to cut down your boilerplate. For example, I'm pretty

I don't know about out-of-source building, but I know Make has a bunch of built-in rules that you can use to cut down your boilerplate. For example, I'm pretty sure that a filename depending on objects will automatically be created by linking those objects (although you'd have to specify your libraries in LDFLAGS rather than LIBS. Also, your rule for building .o files from .c files would be automatic if you put your include-directives in CPPFLAGS instead of INCS.