Are you sure you've actually studied make?

• Dependencies are hard to maintain in any build system. For C++, GNU make can read the files and determine the dependency tree from the #include statements.
• Using other sub-components, in the make world, would be using other makefiles. These are known as dependent makefiles and is a very common thing to do. Apache2, for example, requires APR. That, in turn, often requires neon. It's opensource for a reason.
• make can also grab the source. Just create another task. (Why are you using CVS and not SVN/SVK/Git/Darcs?)
• make can call out to other tools.

Now, if you're absolutely set on hating make (which is dumb, imho), then take a look at Rake (Ruby's make). It, at least, is sane.

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