Books about portable build systems?

[KarlisRepsons]

People,
in a need of a portable build system, which could also be used to cross-compile and test code on more than one compiler at once, I've came here to ask for the recommended books and tools or whatever else, which is useful for the purpose... How do we think, is autotools the right choice for a non-gui library? (note: only free software considered here!) The library itself is intended to be usable on at least two different platforms... (Linux/Windows)

[qabil]

devc++ maybe

[Bazzy]

gcc is easily configurable to be a cross compiler

[KarlisRepsons]

Well I have made a cross-compiled app. and library, so I'm looking for much more detailed information than "gcc", which alone is just a set of compilers, not a build system... There is so much more to write, that I just won't -- either you know some good book or other kind of link for this or we leave this thread and admit, I posted the wrong forum...

devc++? Ah, beautiful, the world saviour IDE you mean?

[1yR4jE8b]

There's always CMake, I've used it before and it is very nice for cross platform dev. QT is also crossplatform, and is not just made for GUI designs, and QMake takes care of generating platform specific Makefiles for you. You probably don't want to add such a heavy dependency though.

If you're also looking for a IDE to go with it, I would recommend Netbeans. It's written in Java (ewww Java) but it's consistent among platforms and you can easily configure it to use different sets of compilers and build-systems (such as CMake or QMake).

Netbeans is a bit heavy, so if you want to go lighter than you could always try Code::Blocks, just download the newest nightly build from their forums and you're good to go. You can also easily configure it to use different compilers, but I don't think it's flexible enough to use anything but it's own built-in build-system, though I'm not sure. Code::Blocks is also cross-platform also, so using it in a Windows and Linux environment is a snap.

[KarlisRepsons]

By writing "build system" I meant the software entity, which is in total responsible to build/rebuild a source file tree to make the requested target(s), which can be some combination of (platform+compiler)s (*Linux build, *Windows build with mingw32, *build with some different compiler, *groupings of them)... So the project will sometimes be configured and compiled on different OSes, mostly built/rebuilt on the native OS, but sometimes (cross) compiles of different targets should happen on the same system just to see if things are well to that point. Quite a task, I'd say.

Looks like I only have two good options: CMake or Autotools. I've been hanging around them for a while, still there is pretty much of quandary. CMake doesn't seem exactly good for Unix servers, while Autotools might be cumbersome to get working on Windows. Both of the tools can have some serious problems, but I lack detailed knowledge at the moment...