I recently started work on a new automake-like project, called Quagmire. I thought folks interested in Automake would also be interested in this; I hope no one is offended that I am posting this here.
For years I've been interested in a few twists on the auto* idea: * Integrate configury into the build. This has some nice benefits, most notably that checking can be on-demand and parallelized. * A minimized, "low-expectation" libtool-like thing integrated into the Makefiles. * An automake-workalike that uses GNU Make features rather than a preprocessor. This is what Quagmire aims to accomplish. Currently it has functionality equivalent to (and in many cases, taken directly from :-) parts of Automake -- it supports the most common things (C, C++, etc). It also has some rudimentary support for a few configure-like operations (though it still does, and always will, require at least a minimal autoconf-produced configure). The syntax is about as close to Automake's as possible -- primaries, directory prefixes, etc. (FWIW I never considered the syntax among Automake's problems -- I still think it is very reasonable.) Of course, Quagmire is not for everybody. GNU make is an absolute requirement -- in fact, Quagmire currently requires 3.81, the latest release. But, if you don't mind this dependency, you might consider Quagmire. Here's the hosting location: http://code.google.com/p/quagmire/ And the mailing list: http://groups.google.com/group/quagmire-discuss If you are interested in discussing Quagmire, its direction, its pointlessness, whatever -- I would suggest moving to the Quagmire list so as not to disturb this list too much. thanks, Tom