Re: HOWTO distribute a project

Not necessarily an answer to the question, and I'm sure it has been mentioned before, but Jam (Freetype Jam) combines make + autotools into one very well designed program and rule based language.

Quick example:

glyph's hello program can be compiled with the following Jamfile:

Main hello : hello.c ;

That's it. This will DoTheRightThing[tm] on many different platforms (including Windows.) More complex projects are just as easy to create a Jamfile/Jamrules for. Sybase uses (used?) it to build Open Server.

I don't know why it's not used more often in the free software world. It also solves such problems as Recurisve Make Considered Harmful and it'll never screw up a parallel build. It will build big projects faster!

Using it in conjunction with distcc and/or ccache will give you some very respectable build times.

A nice rule to add to a Jamrules file would be a PkgConfig rule (which I plan to write) which did the right thing on UNIX as well as Windows. I'm not sure if pkg-config can actually be used on Windows. If it is usable, will a pkg-config --libs gtk-2.0 output a bunch of .lib's? Does a pkg-config --cflags gtk-2.0 output cl.exe compatible compiler switches?