GUI-based build system

[John J. Lee]

"John Roth" <newsgroups at jhrothjr.com> writes:

> "Hung Jung Lu" <hungjunglu at yahoo.com> wrote in message
> news:8ef9bea6.0310291453.3b0237a7 at posting.google.com...
[...]
> > Hmm... perhaps I should have not mentioned the expression "build
> > system". I have in mind something more general than the build system
> > for compiling and assembling a software package. I have in mind system
> > tasks, including hitting databases, running DTS packages. That is,
> > what I have in mind is not a coder's tool (which is basically an
> > advanced makefile system), but an enterprise system tool for task

We'll assume you're not a native speaker, and forgive you for using
the 'e' word in a technical forum ;-)


> > management. In short, one level above. I have in mind tasks that are
> > much more complicated than just a command line, that's why I mentioned

AFAICT, "much more complicated than just a command line" doesn't mean
much.  You can stick anything in a program runnable from the command
line.


> > about writing individual wrappers for every task. Of course the same
> > system could be used for makefile purpose, but I would like something
> > that's more general than makefile.

"Much more general" *how* exactly?  make is already pretty general,
though it tries quite hard to hide it under layers of default rules,
recursive builds, and other nastiness.  It solves the dependency
problem.

[...]
> I thought that was what Ant did? You build a class to handle each
> task, and that class could do whatever it needed to do.

I thought that was what *make* did!  Seriously, though I truly hate
the beast, make is just as powerful as any other build dependency
system.  There are hard cases (LaTeX springs to mind), but I think the
other build systems have just the same trouble with those cases: you
just have to write special-purpose scripts for those (and then run
them from make, or whatever).  No GUI, of course.

Scons' feature list is definitely looking impressive, and the author's
prior experience with cons is very reassuring...


John