Eclipse and Make projects on Linux

For some reasons, to build a project I have to run make with root privileges.
I love to run it from within Eclipse, so that the output from the console is piped nicely into the IDE. Before I thought I could safely run Eclipse as root for that purpose. That choice has caused though a lot of pain...
So I've looked for other ways like adding myself to 'sudoers' with no password, and adding 'sudo make' to the project compile settings
But Eclipse fails and returns an error like 'exec failed to run sudo make'.
A quick workaround I've found is to create an additional dummy makefile in another directory with the same targets as our make, and each targets just calls the real makefile, by prepending sudo to the make command, for example:

all:

cd .. ; sudo make all

The real solution to my problem would be not to have to run 'make' as root.
In order to do that I need to find a way to grant users privileges like running the 'chmod' command on files they don't own. There must be a way to do it...