[htfy96]

As a C developer I have to say there exists no idiomatic makefile - configuring header file dependencies with -MMD/auto rebuild targets affected by FLAGS change already makes your Makefile look like magic. As the project grows, eventually you will need some kind of flexibility that makefile cannot do well. In this case, explicit Python scripts become more useful that a bunch of possibly implicit makefile rules.

[kingosticks]

Perhaps we need some kind of make8 tool to check for best practices and prevent us writing these magic make files.