Makepp, a build program that has a number of features that allow for reliable builds and simpler build files, is a drop-in replacement for GNU make. It supports almost all of the syntax that GNU make supports, and can be used with makefiles produced by utilities such as automake. It is called makepp (or make++) because it was designed with special support for C++, which has since been extended to other languages like Swig or embedded SQL. Some features that makepp adds to make are: greatly improved handling of builds that involve multiple makefiles (recursive make is no longer necessary); automatic scanning for include files; rebuilds triggered if build command changes; checksum-based signature methods for reliable builds, smart enough to ignore whitespace or comment changes; extensibility through Perl programming (within your makefile); repositories (automatically importing files from another tree); and build caches (not recompiling identically what a user of the same cache already did).
