Re: [dev] [OFFTOPIC] Recommended meta-build system

Thanks to everyone for all the help.

I'm looking more at the development process than the distribution
process which means different issues are most important for me. The
big issue I'm looking at is that I've got lots of programs which can
be visualised as having "conventional" dependencies with the twist
that suppose executable "foo" depends upon "colourSegmentation.o", if
the target processor has SSE3 instructions the IF there's an processor
optimised segmentation.c in the SSE3 directory compile and link
against that, IF it doesn't exist compile and link against the version
in the GENERIC_C directory. I think maintaining separate makefiles
that are manually kept up to date in each case as new processor
oprtimised code gets written is going to be reliable in the longer
term. I think I'll follow the general advice to maintain a single
makefile that describes the non-processor specific dependencies by
hand and then try some homebrew script to automatically infer and add
appropriate paths to object files in each processor-capability
makefile depending on availability for each processor-capability set.
(This is probaby not a common problem.)

> I recommend mk from Plan 9, the syntax is clean and clearly defined
> (not the problem is it BSD make, is it GNU make or is it some archaic
> Unix make?). I found that all meta build systems suck in one way or
> another -- some do a good job at first glance, like scons, but they
> all hide what they really do and in the end it's like trying to
> understand configure scripts if something goes wrong. make or mk are
> better choices in this regard.

Yeah. I don't mind powerful languages for doing stuff "automatically",
the problem is systems that aren't designed to be easily debuggable
when they go wrong.

-- 
cheers, dave tweed__________________________
computer vision reasearcher: david.tweed_AT_gmail.com
"while having code so boring anyone can maintain it, use Python." --
attempted insult seen on slashdot