I’ve been trying to find a make alternative or interface using more common languages, and so far, the only one I’ve found was waf (which, IMHO, wasn’t well documented and overly complex). Maybe I haven’t done enough research, but seriously, why do people have to reinvent the wheel for just a build system?

I spent around two days writing this (haven’t wrote shell scripts for a while), and I’m pleased of the result. Notice that this script is still in alpha stage, so I can’t guarantee that everything will work as expected. The main difference between this build system and others is that it works by commands (functions), which then runs the compilers, linkers, and whatever else is needed. Because of this design, it should (in theory) be more powerful and easier to code than a normal makefile. Here is an example of what I’m saying (sorry about the horrible formatting, wordpress breaks it):

Buildfile:

build() {
sources='file1.c file2.c file3.c file4.c file5.c file6.c main.c'
objects='file1.o file2.o file3.o file4.o file5.o file6.o main.o'
output="main"
runtargets $sources $objects 'gcc -c $target -o $output'
gcc $objects -o $output
}
addcmd build build Builds the project
default_command=build

Makefile:

all: main
file1.o: file1.c
gcc -c file1.c -o file1.o
file2.o: file2.c
gcc -c file2.c -o file2.o
(repeat this for each of the targets...)
main: file1.o file2.o file3.o file4.o file5.o file6.o main.o
gcc file1.o file2.o file3.o file4.o file5.o file6.o main.o -o main

For me, the buildfile technique seems much cleaner and easier, and anyways, it’s shell, so you can call functions within it to make your life even easier, etc…

The other thing that I spent a bit of time on was to add common utility functions so you don’t have to write them yourself. Some of them include:

• Automatic uninstaller
• printc for printing text in colors
• Many array utilities
• Help system (still a WIP)

No documentation is currently available, since I’m still polishing it, but I will add some soon. In the meantime, you can just browse through the source (honestly, it will only take you a couple of minutes, it’s currently very small). You can also check the buildfile for it, as it contains many of the functions you would probably use.

Source is located here: https://github.com/MiJyn/shbuild. You can easily build and install the source by using the “build.sh” script (it’s simply a wrapper to use the unbuilt version of shbuild), like so:

sudo ./build.sh install

Let me know what you think, anything constructive (bug reports, ideas, patches, things that were unclear in this post, etc…) is appreciated

Source: FULL ARTICLE at Planet Ubuntu