I currently maintain a few boxes that house a loosely related cornucopia of coding projects, databases and repositories (ranging from a homebrew *nix distro to my class notes), maintained by myself and a few equally pasty-skinned nerdy friends (all of said cornucopia is stored in SVN).

The vast majority of our code is in C/C++/assembly (a few utilities are in python/perl/php, we're not big java fans), compiled in gcc. Our build toolchain typically consists of a hodgepodge of make, bash, grep, sed and awk. Recent discovery of a Makefile nearly as long as the program it builds (as well as everyone's general anxiety with my cryptic sed and awking) has motivated me to seek a less painful build system.

Currently, the strongest candidate I've come across is Boost Build/Bjam as a replacement for GNU make and python as a replacement for our build-related bash scripts. Are there any other C/C++/asm build systems out there worth looking into? I've browsed through a number of make alternatives, but I haven't found any that are developed by names I know aside from Boost's.

(I should note that an ability to easily extract information from svn commandline tools such as svnversion is important, as well as enough flexibility to configure for builds of asm projects as easily as c/c++ projects)