pydoit

So "doit" is a build tool written in Python, designed to be more general in scope than make. The documentation speaks of workflow. It looks like an attractive tool.

And speaking of attraction, it seems to me that there are natural "semantic attractors" when it comes to the many tools written for the same domain. What you'd really want to do is to boil things down to a semantic core and then map out how each tool expresses things in its own unique way. Factor out the commonality, as it were.

So the build tool domain would be an interesting domain to do that in, especially given its patent usefulness in building tools.

Survey of C header files across operating systems

Build harnesses for C programs need to check for the presence of header files on any specific operating system - or do they? Coverage is actually pretty standard these days, according to Zack Weinberg, who has a survey. This is useful!

Building .DS_Store files for the Mac-impaired

Neat.

Grunt

Grunt seems like an interesting JavaScript-based development workflow/build automation system.  This is the kind of task automation I'm spending a lot of time thinking about these days.

Punch

Punch is yet another static content builder, and looks pretty neat.

This post is tagged "Web frameworks, build systems, boilerplate".  It's interesting to see those tags converging.  Very interesting.

roots toolbox for web products

roots is a static site compiler written in node.js.

GYP - build builder

GYP (Generate Your Projects) is a build descriptor system.  Interesting.

Build monitoring

TravisLight is a build monitoring tool for online (continuous integration) builds.

Ebook publishing process

Good example of a build framework.

Code management at Intuit

Intuit has been around since 1983, and offers a series of financial management products that largely share a single codebase.  A codebase of 10 million lines of C.  Dr. Dobbs interviewed one of their managers about how they do that, but here's the gist:

• A single massive codebase and build system that manages multiple build variants (localized versions, versions on different platforms, actual different price-point product complexity variants, etc.).
• Continuous integration and testing.
• Automated QA.
• Rapid iteration in small teams of five or six, which I find somewhat surprising.