Looking for well-logged Make output

[Alexander Nelson]

Hello all,

This email is somewhat a cross-post of a Stack Overflow question:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/16488581/looking-for-well-logged-make-output

The gist is, I run workflows focused on single input files, logging stdout,
stderr and shell exit status of each step.  I think a natural way to
express these workflows is with a Makefile.  However, in the event of an
error (which in my case is more frequently nothing of the program's fault -
the power dies, a disk fills, menial stuff), I'd like Make to be able to
resume a workflow based on the exit status of the intermediary target steps.

That is, if the Make rules include target "target4", I'd like Make to
interpret "target4.status.log" having the contents "0" or "0\n" as "Ok,
target4 built."  But if the log contained anything else, like "1\n" or
"Started", Make would treat that as not-ok and halt.

>From the crickets except one person on Stack Overflow; the gmake man page;
Wikipedia's make-like programs page; and writing a mess of Bash, Python and
Make to do this before; I'm guessing this doesn't exist in any Make.
 However, I figure this list may provide a more authoritative answer.

Has anybody seen something like what I'm asking about before?

--Alex