On Mon, Nov 21, 2005 at 12:17:16PM +0000, Tim Ellison wrote: > There is a distinction to be drawn between the portability of the > 'product' (i.e. the VM, class libaries, tools, etc.) that we are > building, and the portability of the toolsuite that is used to build it.
Hmm. > I'm not convinced of the need to make the development toolset portable > across all platforms. Regardless of the relative merits of Ant and make and other alternatives (I tend to think both Ant and make are painful beyond a certain project size. Lately I've been a fan of scons (http://www.scons.org/)), having a stable, consistent, free, dependable, stable, easily accessible, stable (etc) build system is quite important for open source project success. I didn't say portable, but having a cross-platform (cross-make, cross-compiler, ...) build system means you only need to maintain one which might mean all those other factors are consistently taken care of. The "build consistency" of higher level tools such as Maven or the various setups for all the scripting languages (Ruby Gems comes to mind) is very valuable and if its attainable for us (really, I don't have a clue) then that is quite valuable. LSD
