[vos-d] bakefiles

[Peter Amstutz]

I'm considering switching the VOS s5 build system from automake to 
Bakefile (http://bakefile.org).  The reason is that the maintainance 
overhead imposed by automake has started to get annoying, and that 
automake provides no support for building outside the conventional unix 
toolchain (for example, using Visual Studio).  The main recommendation 
for Bakefile is that it is used to by WxWidgets, which is a project with 
critical need for a cross-platform build system if ever there was one.

Bakefile is similar to automake in that rather than actually running the 
compiler itself, it is a sort of meta-makefile that is compiled to 
produce the actual makefile which does the actual work.  Unlike 
automake, bakefiles are designed to be retargeted to produce project 
files for a number of different build systems -- the big one for us 
being Visual Studio projects.  One thing that has impressed me about the 
bakefile system is that it has a target designed specifically to be 
integrated with autoconf (it produces "Makefile.in" files), so we can 
still do all the usual feature tests to configure the build to a 
specific platform.  Also, unlike a full build tool like Jam, due to 
bakefile producing files for the native build system, developers are 
able to build from source distribution without actually needing 
bakefile.

Does anyone have suggestions for other build tools I should consider?  
Other ones I can think of offhand are jam, bjam, ant and scons, all of 
which annoy me at some level (except for scons, which I haven't used.)

-- 
[   Peter Amstutz  ][ tetron at interreality.org ][ peter.amstutz at gdit.com ]
[Lead Programmer][Interreality Project][Virtual Reality for the Internet]
[ VOS: Next Generation Internet Communication][ http://interreality.org ]
[ http://interreality.org/~tetron ][ pgpkey:  pgpkeys.mit.edu  18C21DF7 ]

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