[Mono-devel-list] Elegant cross-platform and cross-IDE build system for CIL projects

[Ian MacLean]

Andrew Clunis wrote:

>Greetings all!
>
>The CIL/.NET is a great system for writing clean, well-integrated,
>standardized applications of many types quickly and painlessly on all
>manner of different systems.  But one problem that seems to remain is
>coming up with a clean, standard, friendly to multiple environments
>method for organizing the source trees and build systems of our CIL
>applications and libraries.
>
>This is what is out there so far:
>
>-- IDE specific build systems
>  -- such as a VS.net solution/msbuild or MD/#D combine
>  -- require the use of that particular IDE, or perhaps an 'importer' of
>another IDE... definitely a case of YMMV on this one.
>  -- no reasonable support for installation/packaging
>  -- usually very environment specific
>
>-- Environment Build systems
>  -- GNU autotools and make
>  -- Microsoft Make
>  -- batch files and shell scripts
>  -- goodness knows what else
>  -- things usually hardwired (ie., expecting the compiler to be named
>'mcs')
>  -- usually terribly unfriendly to other environments!
>
>-- prebuilders
>  -- such as dnpb (http://dnpb.sf.net)
>  -- generate project files for a host of IDEs and build tools
>  -- does not actually build anything itself
>  -- existing implementations do not include things like
>installation/packaging metadata
>
>-- agnostic build systems
>  -- such as nant (http://nant.sf.net)
>  -- like make, use a project metadata file and builds using that
>  -- again, only limited support for installation/packaging metadata,
>usually involving hacks
>  
>
can you please explain what you mean by installation/packaging metadata 
in this context and detail what hacks you are referring to ?

>  -- nant itself has a broken build system, and the code is also
>somewhat broken under mono
>  
>
How is the nant build system broken ?
Our latest cvs builds and runs fine on Mono 1.0. Some of our unit tests 
are failing on mono its true but we're working thru those now logging 
mono/ms.net incompatibility bugs where appropriate.

Ian