How many systems are you talking about supporting with this one makefile? You should be able to support most linux systems with a single makefile although you might be better off researching the packaging system used by various distros for that purpose. If you want to cross over to the BSDs you may have some problems. You could go to the GNU Make project and look at the manual there and see if it talks about cross platform makefiles....

I would like to target linux distros and the BSDs. There will maybe be a version for windows too (for my windows friends :-) ) but it will be binary, so this Makefile should do well for linux and BSD.
If BSD would really create some unexpected problems, I would make a version for BSD too (think I'll need to grab some BSD soon).

Supporting OS X would be ok as well, but it is just too soon to go there.

The biggest thing with BSD is going to be slight differences in where things might get put, which you may likely encounter on linux distros too. I would definitely check out the documentation of GNU Make and see about making as generic a makefile as possible that pulls in different distro dependent configs that could contain variables for the different variations, there should be some good stuff in the docs for make on how to handle this sort of thing but I don't use make so I don't really know...

Thank you, you have been helpful :-) , the thing here is that I am doing this multi-distro scripts for the first time and want to do it properly. And learn while doing it.

So, it is docs then ... well, I'll look them up these days :-D .

That'd be where I suggest looking. Since no one seems to have specific experience, or if they do they're not speaking up, I'd look to GNU Make's manual. O'Reilly has a print version available too.

This is what you are looking for:

http://sources.redhat.com/autobook/

Thanks, this really looks great, I'm downloading it right now :-) .