[frognibble]

There's something to be said for relatively simple tool like make. It can be a lot easier to understand what's going on with Make because it eliminates the layers of stuff between the build script and the actual commands that are run. That's not to say that it's possible to write inscrutable Makefiles.

[jmount]

Java presents a lot of problems for make (multiple classes from a single java file, JNI produced files, circular class references, package to package dependencies).