I find that in recent versions of GNU make, the ONESHELL and define directives alleviate some of the pain of multi-line rules. There is also this emacs package

I find that in recent versions of GNU make, the ONESHELL and define directives alleviate some of the pain of multi-line rules. There is also this emacs package [1] I wrote while maintaining an inline-shell heavy makefile framework that had to run on make 3.81 (the version that comes with CentOS 6). I definitely agree with you on extracting rules into separate scripts, but I've yet to see a make-based build system that embraces this idea. [1]: https://github.com/gvalkov/makefile-shell-backslash