Hi all,
I've been working on a project to replace all of our old aging Makefile.mingw and the Makedep stuff for win32 builds.
From the years when I worked in Java, I learned to love the Ant build tool and how it automates many tasks, and replaces a lot of shelling out for trivial tasks (copy, mkdir, delete, etc).
So I made this Buildtool thing vaguely similar to Ant. It is of course infinitely less powerful than that mature project. But the basic theory of operation is the same. And if there is ever any new feature or function we need, we can easily code it into the tool.
So, instead of requiring Perl, we have a single .cpp file and a build descriptor file, "build.xml," which currently is the only file it needs for a complete Inkscape build.
To run the thing, merely do: g++ buildtool.cpp -o build.exe
There are no dependencies.
Then compile with "build" or clean up with "build clean"
I see no reason that an alternative build.xml could not be made for running on Unix, also.
bob