Remaking make using GNU autotools?

[http://sources.redhat.com/automake/automake.html]

Remake principles:

• split and divide - smaller units are easier to manage
• separation of concerns - applications and basic language tools are separate beasts
• reuse others knowledge and experience

My observations & conclusions so far:

• the autotools try to solve exactly the same problem, only for a different domain
• the autotools are actually used to compile the HFST transducers (se, fi, fr, …)
• there’s a whole body of experience out there
• so why not use these tools?

Implications:

• one makefile for each dir
• nested buildling
• template for populating

After some discussion, with pointers to alternatives and to discussions on the about problems with the autotools set, we settled on CMake as our first attempt at creating a more sane build infrastructure.

Download: http://cmake.org/cmake/resources/software.html

An example of a CMake dependency + build instruction:

PROJECT(Document)
IF(LATEX_COMPILE)
  ADD_CUSTOM_COMMAND(
    OUTPUT    ${Document_BINARY_DIR}/TDocument.dvi
    DEPENDS   ${Document_BINARY_DIR}/TDocument.tex
    COMMAND   ${LATEX_COMPILE}
    ARGS      ${Document_SOURCE_DIR}/TDocument.tex
    )
ENDIF(LATEX_COMPILE)

IF(DVIPDF_COMPILE)
  ADD_CUSTOM_COMMAND(
    OUTPUT    ${Document_BINARY_DIR}/TDocument.pdf
    DEPENDS   ${Document_BINARY_DIR}/TDocument.dvi
    COMMAND   ${DVIPDF_COMPILE}
    ARGS      ${Document_SOURCE_DIR}/TDocument.dvi
    )
ENDIF(DVIPDF_COMPILE)

So, we could try to do something concrete, e.g. build some part of sme using cmake.