Prototype buildsystem "Drake"

[Nick Sabalausky]

"Jacob Carlborg" <doob at me.com> wrote in message 
news:ivng77$305d$1 at digitalmars.com...
> On 2011-07-13 23:52, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
>> Hmm, yea, configure didn't even occur to me. I think it could acually be
>> done as just another File target that everything else depends on. Only 
>> thing
>> is then you'd have to save/load the configuration file manually, so maybe
>> there should be some convenience mechnism for that (Maybe utilizing 
>> Jacob's
>> Orange serialization library once that rewrite is done? Or maybe that 
>> would
>> be overkill? Is there some INI-file util, or am I just imagining that?)
>
> What about doing something like DSSS/rebuild does. There are config files 
> for dmd, ldc and gdc on various platforms. You can choose to invoke 
> different compilers and it will use the config file for that particular 
> compiler on the current platform.
>

One of my main goals for Drake is that using any old random tool (besides 
just building D code) doesn't feel like an afterthought. That 
DSSS/rebuild-style approach doesn't seem like it would scale particularly 
well in that direction. I think whatever solution is used needs to work just 
as well for the user's own custom tools as it does for DMD/LDC/GDC. Then, 
any D-specific simplifications/improvements that are made should be built on 
top of that. For example, we could provide a function the user calls from 
within their "configure" step that automatically handles D-specific 
configuring (And yea, maybe we could even automatically provide a default 
"configure" that already calls that function.)