ok, firstly I don't hate make, and it was my first choice before someone was proposing Scons (by the way, thanks for the "dumb"). There are alternatives to make, so why not looking at them before deciding what is the best choice for us ?

Secondly, if make is so perfect, why are so many advanced building tools developed to replace make? Not only are they developed, but also widely used.

To come back on dependencies, sometime looking at the include tree is not optimal, as some compilation unit will not require recompilation if a given include is modified, and of course some compilation unit will require recompilation even if no include was modified. I don't know for sure yet that Scons will allow us to manage this cases, but GNU make will not.

CVS is the corporate choice for source management in my company. No choice

make can call other tools, but why use other tools with make, if these tasks could be handled directly by the build tool. Each additional tool used has a cost, in term of license fee(if any), maintenance, learning and deployment

To conclude, at first sight, Scons would allow us to have a more advanced build system, and I'm also looking at other solutions. make is one of them, but not the only one, that's why I'm looking at the wider possible choice of solutions. This isn't a hundreds line temporary project, this is an heavy and critical industry project, and I know by experience that a bad choice at the beginning of such a project could lead to years of nightmare.

And thank's for Rake, I will also have a look at this one.