After loathing make for decades and doing my best never to waste any time thinking about it, I spent a week digging in hard and learning it in detail, as though it were a programming language I actually wanted to use. It turned out to be just as terrible as I always thought it was, and I really don't want to use it - but I learned how to make it do the straightforward thing I have always wanted it to do, which I have often fumed and sputtered and groused at it for not doing, and I wrapped that knowledge up in a set of recipes which I now copy into every project I work on. This lets me take advantage of make's ubiquity without having to remember and worry about all of its odd awful corners.

Here are the recipes, most recent version: https://github.com/marssaxman/ozette/blob/master/srctree.mk

And this is an example of a makefile using those recipes: https://github.com/marssaxman/ozette/blob/master/Makefile