I don’t object to “it works for me”, but “it’s really not all that difficult” is a bad generalization.
* If you need portability, Makefiles are hard.
* The whitespace design of Makefiles is bad and has swallowed up countless debugging hours over the years. This design flaw isn’t intrinsic to the way Makefiles work, it’s just a lousy artifact from a superficial decision from decades ago: to change behavior based on distinctions invisible in source code. It’s mitigated by syntax highlighting but still bites people.
* Makefiles are dependent on the consistency of the build environment, for example the availability and behavior of command line switches. Even if your project doesn’t need OS platform portability, this is still a pain across time and requires external tooling to manage.
* There are certain subtleties to the way Makefiles behave that are addressed by `.PHONY`. I agree that these are manageable in the absence of other complexities, but they contribute towards Makefiles being more difficult than appears at first.
I’m sure you’re familiar with those critiques and others. They may not bother you, but you don’t speak for everybody.
My Makefile is portable. It builds binaries that run on six OSes and two architectures. So I used my Makefile to build GNU Make and a GCC toolchain. Now I can run my Makefile on any of those OSes / architectures too, and it'll produce the same deterministic output, bit for bit.
If part of your build is building your own build tool in order to ensure you have the proper build tool then why not build a different “better” build tool?
Part of the premise of Make is its ubiquity, but if you can’t rely on that save as a simple bootstrap (as you seem to be doing) then why not forego it for something else?
My project is literally to make a compiler toolchain. Do you expect me to not use it? The nice thing is that you can build my project on any computer that has modern GNU Make. That and sh are the only things that needs to be installed.
You might want to take a look at the "actually portable executable"* project, made by the person you're responding to. There may be tips that will make make more approchable to you, if you're still dealing with MAKEFILEs.
* If you need portability, Makefiles are hard.
* The whitespace design of Makefiles is bad and has swallowed up countless debugging hours over the years. This design flaw isn’t intrinsic to the way Makefiles work, it’s just a lousy artifact from a superficial decision from decades ago: to change behavior based on distinctions invisible in source code. It’s mitigated by syntax highlighting but still bites people.
* Makefiles are dependent on the consistency of the build environment, for example the availability and behavior of command line switches. Even if your project doesn’t need OS platform portability, this is still a pain across time and requires external tooling to manage.
* There are certain subtleties to the way Makefiles behave that are addressed by `.PHONY`. I agree that these are manageable in the absence of other complexities, but they contribute towards Makefiles being more difficult than appears at first.
I’m sure you’re familiar with those critiques and others. They may not bother you, but you don’t speak for everybody.