OK, to drive it even further OT, I only use KDevelop because I'm not able to mess with makefiles directly. Does any Linux developer gurus that might be here know how do all the developers generate/manage the makefiles for large projects? Makefiles have always been one of the biggest reasons I hesitate to develop for Linux a lot! :-)
Well make in itself is easy enough, it's autoconf and automake that make it hard (for me at least). My opinion is that the days of the Holy Trinity autoconf/automake/make are numbered; have you tried scons (http://www.scons.org/) or aap (www.aap.org)? These are next-generation build tools. I see more and more project migrate to them. Problem is that the gnu rules prescribe autoconf and consorts, so a lot of projects already use them, and once you have a working build system, there is little incentive to change.
Anyway, there is a very nice (introductory, don't expect too much) article on make on developer.gnome.org somewhere. I can't reach that server right now, but go have a look if you insist on learning make.
cheers,
roel
