I'm a principal maintainer of Cons, a Perl-based software builder (i.e., Make utility). Use Perl, not Make, to build your software! Cons is not Makefile-compatible, the configuration files are actually Perl s‎crip‎ts. Cons also provides much better dependency analysis and a set of additional features that build software much faster and more reliably than Make.

Out of this effort I wrote the Test::Cmd module as a harness for command testing.