Hello,
I'd really appreciate if someone could give me some hints which might further understanding but just for the fun of it I'm gonna confront you with my rationale.

I wondered whether I could write a script, which would list in a file, every effective output to the file system a package does while building/running make. So basically I'd be interested in a complete list of every file the build dumps on my disk. Like, I like maps.
I figured make would probably go around using the shell, so if I had it run in a shell invocation of which I monitor/log the output that might help, though I'm not exactly sure whether this would all be output through (1) (like, the stdout doesn't tell me where mkdir made dir, does it? and parsing on that level I'd have to know every tool and where in it's invocation in the scripted commands it would specify place to execute, wouldn't I?).
I also thought maybe it would be easier and more sensible to monitor changes in the file-system directly instead of shell I/O but I would not at all know how to go about that and which GNU-foo might help me doing that - and maybe those ideas are quite idiotic generally speaking, so I'd just like some hints here.
I found a text on how to write MAKEFILES - guess I will take the pain biting through that anyway, but is that the only lot I got?

I'd really like to understand the applications running on my system better, at least to a degree they're not just an utter black box, which interfaces me with some configs, and this was what I thought might be a suitable way to go about that - I often don't know where all them manifestations of an application are and what's happening there. Documentations on those large packages, like applications and development platforms, tends to assume users who don't really care or already know all about how such things go about their business (in the OS), it seems to me, and that frustrates me.

Best wishes

So if I understand you correctly you would like to know what makes application and promgrams on your system tick?

How they launch and what configuration files are read, what instructions they give to the API, and what makes them launch and function?

I'd like to know which distro your using. Debian and its forks, like Ubuntu, Mint, Arch, and almost every other distro have tools to do what you desire. On any system you can use the "find" command to search for files modified during the previous so and so number of minutes. If you installed an application during the last ten minutes, then search for all files modified in the last ten minutes.

Xubuntu. Pretty dense choice, I figure by now, but I plan on sticking with it till the end of the year and hope that I'll be capable to go and compile from scratch then mostly. I think I'm gonna dig into find some more then, thank you. Thinking about it now, that's such a basic idea, I'm embarrassed it escaped me.

Well, yes. I'd just like to have a rudimentary understanding of the data flow and internal processes of software I use. I can't go and read through all the code, there just isn't the time, but most "documentation" I find is way to superficial.
I thought maybe I'd be more confident just seeing the boundaries of the machine so to speak, so I can go and investigate or extrapolate.

Study how configuration files work. That should enlighten you.