> My 'dmake' fu is basically non-existent, so I haven't poked at this seriously 
> yet. [...] a transition is underway to GNU make

Oh, (unfortunately) you have it backwards regarding the complexity;)

dmake is mostly a normal make with few special features. Understanding how 
things work in the old build mechanism is not that hard, it does not require 
re-adjusting your perception of what makefiles are and how they look. 
Basically, it uses plain makefiles, that include a set of common "headers" with 
makefile snippets. There are relatively normal-looking rules where targets 
depend on pre-requisites with a  recipe of commands following. Sure, there are 
nests of .IF/.ELSE/.ENDIF conditionals. Sure, the actual rules are in the 
"headers" and use variables defined in the outermost directory-specific 
makefile.mk. But still...

It's the new GNU Make based system that is much harder to understand... because 
there the makefiles don't look normal at all, as all the actual rules are 
generated dynamically by eval and call function invocations. Sure, looking at 
the top level of a makefile for a deliverable in a module you can guess what 
the stuff means, I am not saying *that* is hard. But understanding how it 
actually works, and doing changes to that, can be hard.

--tml


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