If we're talking about autotools alternatives, there's also WAF:    <a href="http://code.google.com/p/waf/">http://code.google.com/p/waf/</a> It doesn't generate msvc project files, but it uses a well known and simple language (python), is portable, and very fast.  It actually avoids generating files like CMake and autotools.  Surely I am not the only one who's sick of generated files... (not that I would consider myself a Cairo hacker or anything; just mentioning WAF for the sake of completeness...) <div class="gmail_quote">2008/4/29 Alan W. Irwin <<a href="mailto:irwin@beluga.phys.uvic.ca">irwin@beluga.phys.uvic.ca</a>>: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">The recent troubles with libtool mentioned on list remind me of when we used autotools to build PLplot; it wasn't too bad, but on the other hand, every month or so there was yet another build-system irritation we had to solve. Thus, our developers were happy to replace autotools with CMake for our build system.  CMake syntax is easy to learn yet extremely powerful so our developers were able to participate in the change rather than leaving it to just a couple of individuals.  As a bonus it works well on essentially all Unix and Windows variants.  For example, PLplot has had good build reports for Linux, Mac OS X, Cygwin, MinGW/MSYS, and windows with proprietary compilers. The cmake command is equivalent to autotools "configure", and after you run cmake, then you follow with the usual "make" and "make install".  The use of the massive and slow libtool script during the build is replaced by configured Makefiles with the compile and link options built in.  For this reason and others, CMake build-system latency is substantially reduced compared to autotools which is a nice bonus for developers. A CMake-based build system can coexist peacefully with an autotools-based build system so while we developed the new CMake-based build system we kept our old autotools build system alive to serve as a basis of comparison.  However, we eventually dropped our autotools-based build system completely because nobody was willing to continue to deal with its irritations. Since creating our CMake-based build system, PLplot development has flourished (including a new cairo-based device driver), and in retrospect I believe it was the intimidation of the required autotools build-system changes that was holding our developers back before. I haven't explored autotools build system alternatives other than CMake, but my understanding is there are a lot of them that are maturing right now so the basic point I want to make is autotools was good enough in its day, but it is now time for most software projects to give a serious look at the much-better alternatives. There is nothing urgent about this step, but to my mind it should be on your agenda in a way very similar to how most software projects were considering replacements for CVS several years ago. Alan __________________________ Alan W. Irwin Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Victoria (<a href="http://astrowww.phys.uvic.ca" target="_blank">astrowww.phys.uvic.ca</a>). Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state implementation for stellar interiors (<a href="http://freeeos.sf.net" target="_blank">freeeos.sf.net</a>); PLplot scientific plotting software package (<a href="http://plplot.org" target="_blank">plplot.org</a>); the libLASi project (<a href="http://unifont.org/lasi" target="_blank">unifont.org/lasi</a>); the Loads of Linux Links project (<a href="http://loll.sf.net" target="_blank">loll.sf.net</a>); and the Linux Brochure Project (<a href="http://lbproject.sf.net" target="_blank">lbproject.sf.net</a>). __________________________ Linux-powered Science __________________________ _______________________________________________ cairo mailing list <a href="mailto:cairo@cairographics.org">cairo@cairographics.org</a> <a href="http://lists.cairographics.org/mailman/listinfo/cairo" target="_blank">http://lists.cairographics.org/mailman/listinfo/cairo</a> </blockquote></div> -- Gustavo J. A. M. Carneiro INESC Porto, Telecommunications and Multimedia Unit "The universe is always one step beyond logic." -- Frank Herbert