On my present project we try to keep things very simple and organized, no obscure make features I think the worst we do is $(patsubst).

Of course, our codebase is much much smaller than the one you have to wrangle so we don’t need all that “power”.

But, c’mon, give us some details! Is it the standard subset of make or GNU make? Do you use the brain-crippled functional facilities such as $(call) and $(foreach)? What about indirection via $($x)? How do you deal with slowdowns caused by command evaluation - by trying hard to not invoke the shell, or by checking for $(MAKELEVEL) to cache results of process invocations? Is the whole dependency tree checked by one hairy Makefile or is make invoked recursively? Do home-made tools count on make’s cute habit of exporting variables as env vars or is it all orderly command line argument passing?

The public wants to know! At least the parts of it buried in the stinky trenches of Makefile maintenance.