I honestly consider any project that is complex enough to require more than a single trivial makefile (eg. lua, say) to be unsuitable for using make at all. Ev

I honestly consider any project that is complex enough to require more than a single trivial makefile (eg. lua, say) to be unsuitable for using make at all. Everything else I've seen that tries is exactly as bad as this paper suggests. This 'modern makefiles' stuff from the android NDK is one of the worst offenders; those makefiles are almost without fail difficult to debug and problematic (just search SO for 'ndk', 'makefile' if you don't believe me), but because it's android, I've actually had people advocate we use that approach for other projects too. Craziness.