> If you love make, it's a big, red, burning flag that you're not demanding enough of your tools and that you're not keeping up with changes in your ecosystem.

> If you love make, it's a big, red, burning flag that you're not demanding enough of your tools and that you're not keeping up with changes in your ecosystem. I wouldn't say that I love make, but it is my tool of choice. I have tried out SCons and CMake, and both seemed to require more hoop-jumping for customizations. That is, Makefiles are very close to being raw shell scripts. That, and SCons had performance issues (IIRC due to the md5sum it was doing on every input file). I have casually perused bjam files and even _building_ boost seemed awkward to me, with the weirdo string-parsing within individual flags. I am happy with autoconf as a package user, but I've never developed any software packages of my own with it. I typically work with C and C++ on Linux server environments. I'm quite happy with non-recursive Makefiles, timestamp-based change detection, and GCC-generated dependency graphs. This setup does incremental builds correctly for me, and parallizes linearly (and occasionally superlinearly due to I/O). I'd genuinely like to know what magic sauce you would recommend for build automation on this sort of a platform.