ant, make and ermake

[Marcin Kaszynski]

Rick Pettit wrote:
> For C code I would really urge someone to give Autotools a shot. A page long
> Makefile can be reduced to just a handful of lines in Makefile.am and
> configure.ac and will produce the most lovely, portable binaries.
> [...]
> Just my 2 cents.

Slightly off topic, but I'll throw in another 2.

I recently converted a medium-sized project (quick check: 1630 .h and .cpp 
files; lots of executables being built; uses Qt for GUI and portability; 
includes some custom build rules) from autotools to scons (smarter make 
replacement) and was _very_ pleased with the results.

The configuration files are much more readable and make it much easier to add 
custom rules for just about everything than autotools.  SCons handles 
dependencies much, much better than anything else I tried so far -- doesn't 
trust modification dates, but actually checks if the file contents changed 
since the last build.  It also keeps track of environment settings, so adding 
or removing a compiler option will trigger a rebuild too.

And you get to write the configuration files in Python, so it is quite easy 
to do weird stuff like writing your own little parser to create the build 
rules based on information from a number of Makefile.am files (the project 
had to be bulidable both using scons and autotools for some time).

I would strongly suggest giving scons a try.

Regards,
-mk

-- 
[...] it is far from clear whether "good intentions plus stupidity" or
"evil intentions plus intelligence" have wrought more harm in the world.

                                 -- Dietrich Dorner, The Logic of Failure