[ previous ] [ Contents ] [ 1 ] [ 2 ] [ 3 ] [ 4 ] [ 5 ] [ 6 ] [ 7 ] [ A ] [ B ] [ next ]


ccbuild - A strict developer's build utility
Chapter 1 - Introduction


First of all, programming is fun. However, it should not become a administrative task where you have to run update tools and add filenames to scripts. Apart from the possible typos, it's just no fun.

Using most of the tools on the net I found myself either adding filenames to scripts (and removing them) or digging deep into the core of some weird scripting language to try automate my builds. I ended up with a clumsy, to say the least, collection of find, grep, sed and bash. Then after having run my script generating script, I had to run ./configure to get the new scripts to generate real Makefiles. Then, the only thing left to do was to run make.

This was a depressing way to develop, because most additions to the project I made required me to run all those scripts. This would take about 30 seconds, or so it felt.

You would say, well why not use an IDE? Well, trouble here was I wanted to seperate my code... a lot. Not only do I seperate my code into directories, I also use seperate files for functions of the same class. No IDE allowed me to do this without the hassle of having to go through a few menus (create file, regester it as source, set is as part of the main program, etc).

Frustrated, I almost gave up on my coding ethics and started to do it the way the masses do: 900 lines of code in a single file, only accesible through a specially equipped text editor or full scale IDE. But then I found another problem: I had to list the libraries I needed in some box somewhere! icmake was one solution, however it had two small drawbacks: object files weren't read for dependencies, you needed to mention your classes and you couldn't use directories in directories. So, I decided to create a fast and simple program to solve my problem.

Although you have to keep some standards to get ccbuild to work on your program, I found it made my programming fun again: write your program, wait a few seconds for ccbuild to catch up and start testing!


[ previous ] [ Contents ] [ 1 ] [ 2 ] [ 3 ] [ 4 ] [ 5 ] [ 6 ] [ 7 ] [ A ] [ B ] [ next ]


ccbuild - A strict developer's build utility

1.5.7

A. Bram Neijt