I only can say that ghoulsblade and hagish, freegamedev.net's admins and developers of (for example) Iris2 wrote good things about premake.
A quick google search let me find hamster.Premake is a build script generator. Describe your project using the full-featured Lua scripting language and then let Premake create the input files for:
- MS Visual Studio 6, 2002, 2003, or 2005
- GNU make (including Cygwin and MinGW)
- IC#Code SharpDevelop
- MonoDevelop
- …more on the way!
Hamster is a general-purpose Lua build system, similar to SCons (which is Python based). You can describe your whole build in 100% Lua, then Hamster will generate a makefile (or scons if that's installed) and do the build.