[ufo]

Whenever I start to write a moderately complex makefile I realize yet again that the makefile programming language sucks and that if I want to stay sane the only way to do it is to go meta (use a separate program to generate a makefile using the bare-minimum features)

[0x09]

Putting the logic into a more flexible configure script that generates definitions for your Makefile and imitates the autotools build process without actually using autotools is a good/obvious compromise. Even some large projects like FFmpeg and mplayer/mpv do this.