>From my experience with using pure-POSIX make for many years now, I have almost no troubles. The only recurring trouble I have is with complex dependency chains (which I aim to keep to a minimum anyway for simplicity) and mtime over sshfs connections. Other than that, make has never failed me.
My best advice for make-based build systems is to try and keep things simple. Unless you have a *really* complicated build process (like a kernel image or something), don't be too fancy. Just use a single, central Makefile and put your sources in one place. If you find yourself having to use GNU extensions, that's often a sign of your process being too complicated. For me, make would be more useful if it could: 1) Auto-detect sources based on regular expression (build src/*.{ch}) 2) Have a clean way of managing dependencies between files But I am generally happy with what I have. Ethan