I love make, but a lot of this advice is targeted at being able to write "better" shell scripts in make. I don't recommend it. If you find yourself writing a shell for loop, you probably want instead to build a list of targets. If you find yourself wanting complex shell variable preparation, you probably instead want target-specific variables. ONESHELL is a good way to accidentally build some invisible dependencies into a recipe, and make it difficult to use custom functions or canned recipes.
If you do find yourself really wanting a shell, you'll probably also want "advanced" features like error traps, and you'll probably want to work with tools like shellcheck (imo critical for any shell script longer than one pipeline). Both are thwarted by baking the invocations into your make recipe. And the recipe still looks great - probably better! - if you extract any logic into a separate script (which then also opens up further possibilities, like including that tool itself in a shell pipeline in a make recipe).
I love make, but a lot of this advice is targeted at being able to write "better" shell scripts in make. I don't recommend it. If you find yourself writing a shell for loop, you probably want instead to build a list of targets. If you find yourself wanting complex shell variable preparation, you probably instead want target-specific variables. ONESHELL is a good way to accidentally build some invisible dependencies into a recipe, and make it difficult to use custom functions or canned recipes.
If you do find yourself really wanting a shell, you'll probably also want "advanced" features like error traps, and you'll probably want to work with tools like shellcheck (imo critical for any shell script longer than one pipeline). Both are thwarted by baking the invocations into your make recipe. And the recipe still looks great - probably better! - if you extract any logic into a separate script (which then also opens up further possibilities, like including that tool itself in a shell pipeline in a make recipe).