2011/6/9 Jon Cruz <jon@...18...>:
Actually most projects do use some build tool of one form or another. At the moment the main candidate for cross-platform building is cmake.
CMake is a popular choice, but I don't understand its popularity. Its scripting language is frustratingly weak. You have to write hundreds of lines to do anything even moderately complex. The syntax is bizarre, sometimes case-sensitive and sometimes not. It would also add another build dependency.
Waf is a 100 kB script that allows you to use Python as the build scripting language. It uses only Python functionality, and we already have the required version of Python in the devlibs. Another plus is that it mimicks Autotools (configure, build, clean, distclean). And those are not theoretical considerations, I have successfully built Inkscape on both Windows and Linux using it and I see no reason why it wouldn't work on OSX. Adding features like revision number in the about box, autogenerated sources, etc. was easy, as there are many examples available.
Regards, Krzysztof