microUgly wrote:
Thirdly, do you use "btool" in place of when you would otherwise specify "make" in an IDE? I don't really understand "btool"--I assume it makes it easier to build Inkscape than running MinGW directly? I'm not sure if I should favor using the MinGW compiler when Netbeans has support for it, especially for debugging? I have created btool and build Inkscape successfully with it.
Then it's doing its job! :-) The main reason for Buildtool is to provide a portable build environment to Windows, Linux, etc. Hopefully it should "just work."
I wanted it to be something like a faint shadow of Ant, (which I love). As many of its tasks as possible are internal, especially simple ones like copy, delete, etc. It only "shells out" for things it can't provide. That way we don't worry about whether to use "copy" or "cp", "rm" or "del", etc.
Also, some of its tasks are directory-based rather than file-based. This way, files don't need to be explicitly listed anywhere. For <cc>, for example, a directory is scanned to determine dependencies. Instead of saying "compile this .cpp file to this .o file", you would say: "compile this directory of .cpp to this directory of .o"
I don't use an IDE, so I don't have a preference, but some of the devs here use Eclipse, so you might get configuration tips from them.
bob (ishmal)