Today I released the first version of Buildcloth which is a tool that I’ve been using at work to programatically (and in some cases) dynamically generate build systems (i.e. Makefiles.)

Background

It’s obviously been “production ready” in some sense for a while, but I recently finished the API documentation, and a lot of the infrastructure for packaging and distribution, so it seemed like this was a good starting point.

The initial idea was basically that while Make syntax can be really powerful, in a number of situations:

• to specify conditional elements,
• to generate build targets and procedures based on system configuration or project state,
• for large numbers similar of targets, and
• for build with where single targets have a group of related rules,

defining build systems programatically ends up producing a much more reliable and maintainable build system. The wins are pretty big in terms of maintainability, clarity, and flexibility.

The idea, and naming, is sort of: do what fabric does for shell scripts and deployment but for build system generators. Maybe this is exactly what you’re looking for.

More Information

Check it out:

• buildcloth on Pypi
• buildcloth github repo

Bugs go here, and patches/pull requests are always welcome.

Cool Improvements:

• full documentation.
• support for specifying targets/dependencies as a list.
• a build-rule abstraction called RuleCloth.
• improved ninja support.

The Roadmap

• making the tutorial and high level documentation better.
• improving the “RuleCloth.”
• adding some preliminary tools for managing data interactions.
• pypy support (why not?)