The requirement is to maintain a configuration file from which software can be built, rather than have to build it manually, which leads to uncertain and untestable deliverables. Some relief from make could be obtained using the dependency management supplied with your version control system (e.g. git). But the most obvious format to replace makefiles with is XML (and lo and behold, a bit of googling leads to a tool called XMake - makefile functionality based on XML files)