Dean Michael Berris wrote:
Not to throw dirt at GNU Make, but it's just too hard and too painful to maintain complex project builds with it. Whether by hand or with auto-tools.
Compare that to the trivial Jamfiles that are smart enough to figure out what to do when you say:
exe main : main.cpp ;
FWIW, that can be done with gmake, too. E.g. I do things like this in my projects: foo_sources = foo.cpp bar.cpp baz.idl apps = foo include make.common and get some level (*) of cross-platformness, too. You can't say cross-platform builds like that aren't possible with gmake. It takes time to develop the harness, but that's true with any build system. Note, I'm not suggesting a switch to make-based systems here. Boost.Build seems to be pretty well developed and a switch back to square one of a different basic build system would not earn us anything. Regards, m *) "some level" because I have a set of platforms to support that is significantly smaller than Boost.Build's range of platforms. However, I think anything that can be done with bjam could be done with gmake, too.