Alternatives to make for linux/freebsd? [closed]

Answer 1

If you're looking for something completely different, there's Ant. I'm not that interested in it myself, but it does offer some portability advantages (no reliance on the unix shell, etc.)

Answer 2

WAF is an interesting alternative. Written in python it allows you to write your build logic in plain Python. Parallel builds + semi-auto-magic signature-based dependency tracking work reasonably well. It's supposedly cross-platform (i.e. knows how to do builds on Windows), but I haven't tried that.

It's got a fairly steep learning curve, but it also comes with "The WAF book" to aid with the process.

Answer 3

My first question would be, what is the audience. Is this for building in-house software that only your team will build? If so, explore some of the options already presented. If this is something that others will be building, either stick with make, or use a tool that creates makefile and ship those. We use autoconf and automake for Linux and other unix platforms. In my opinion, you need a very good reason to do something other than configure; make; make install. Boost has their own tool (a modified version of Jam), and it annoys me everytime I need to try and get it to compile on an unusual machine.

Answer 4

cmake and imake are both build utilities, although Imake is no longer maintained. Cmake is also cross-platform and can be used on Windows as well.

If you're into java, ANT is a build tool geared to Java (which doesn't really play nicely with Make).

Troll tech make a tool called qmake, which they use to build QT. It works by generating makefiles - Troll needed a tool to support a cross-platform build - so you still need another make utility.

Answer 5

OMake is a build tool for C/C++, OCaml, and LaTeX with automatic dependency analysis. It easily can build projects over multiple directories, and it finds changes based on MD5 sum rather than timestamp. It also has a mode where it can be run in the background, building your project whenever a file is modified. Generally, it takes less code to build common kinds of projects (C/C++ or OCaml programs and libraries) than make does. I haven't tried it for bigger projects.

Note that if you want to program in OCaml, this tool is really useful since the OCaml linker requires compiled modules to appear on the command line in dependency order, and figuring out this order every time something changes is non-trivial.

Answer 6

I've heard good things about Jam.