> I rewrote the Makefile for MIDAS in order to make it tidy.

Not that the current Makefile is too pretty (I have seen worse), but it works and it is fairly compact for a project of 
this complexity, it handles a large number of operating systems and build options very efficiently.

I think you found that out with your rewriting exercise - your version of the Makefile contains all the same code, 
just rearranged to suite your taste, with existing bugs preserved and new bugs added.

> I tested it on my box and it works here.

As they say, the devil is in the details. I notice some subtle changes in your Makefile that make me go "what?":

1) the command for building the midas shared library used to be "ld -shared", in your version, "-shared" is gone. 
But check with the GCC manual, today's recommended command is probably "gcc -shared".
2) mhdump is now linked with ROOT, but I wrote it recently enough to remember that it does not use ROOT
3) hand-crafted dependancies have been replaced with generic "almost every .o depends on every .h", which is 
incorrect. The "almost every .o" part bothers me.
4) "make clean" runs "rm -rf" - plain scary.
5) "$(shell ...)" is overused

I think by the end all these little details are sorted out and all the quirks are put back in, your Makefile will look no 
better than the current Makefile.

> 2. The file is less than 400 lines now. The original one is more than 500 lines.

It looks like your savings came from removing comments, removing hand-crafted dependancy lists and replacing 
fairly verbose "make install" targets (which we do not use anyway) with your own much simpler scripts.

All the juicy bits needed to actually build all the code appear to take about as much space as before.

Also the original mistake of recompiling programs when they only need relinking was not fixed. (For example, 
when libmidas is updated, to update mhttpd, the current Makefile needlessly recompiles mhttpd.c. Better use 
would be to compile mhttpd.c into mhttpd.o, then only a relink is needed).

> I tried to learn "autoconf" and "automake" in order to make building MIDAS more
> compatible for various platforms. But I havn't enough time now. Hope somebody
> can help it. The attached file is original named "Makefile.in" for using "autoconf".

Most experience with autoconf/automake is all negative. The promise was "never debug your Makefile ever 
again!", delivered was "debug the configure script instead!". In practice, with autoconf/automake, you try to run 
configure, kludge it until it stops crashing, then tweak the incomprehensible Makefiles it produces until the code 
compiles.

K.O.