[nant-dev] Re: [MonoDevelop] #D coorporation

[Jaroslaw Kowalski]

> > 3. does nant support building C?
>
> Just ask it to the NAnt community: Ian, Gert, Jarek, is there any
> plan to build C support in NAnt?

I don't think it's a good idea for NAnt to directly support C compilation or
even C compiler invocation, just because it's soooo complex (just look at
the size of typical "configure" generated by autoconf). NAnt is about
portability.

<some-wild-ideas>

I think we actually could support the auto* tools instead.

Considering that most C packages today have a pretty standard installation
routines:

./configure --prefix=... && make && make install

NAnt could support it by:

- locating locating and running make executable for you (this is non-trivial
on win32, on Unix you have some options too...). Same thing applies to other
gnu utilities and even /bin/sh.
- setting the appropriate standard environment variables (like CC, CFLAGS,
etc.)
- filtering the build output messages (for example to show only errors and
warnings)
- perhaps we could also support some standard ways of specifying where
components are located (like PKGCONFIG_PATH), e.g. by detecting host OS
type.
- I'm also thinking about automating software tarballs downloads and
extraction (not very sophisticated, we don't want to have another Gentoo or
BSD ports implemented in .NET)

In general, I think NAnt should support running auto*tools instead of
replacing them.

</some-wild-ideas>

Awaiting your opinions.

Jarek