Project Quagmire

[Tom Tromey]

I recently started work on a new automake-like project, called
Quagmire.  I thought folks interested in Automake would also be
interested in this; I hope no one is offended that I am posting this
here.

For years I've been interested in a few twists on the auto* idea:

* Integrate configury into the build.  This has some nice benefits,
  most notably that checking can be on-demand and parallelized.

* A minimized, "low-expectation" libtool-like thing integrated into
  the Makefiles.

* An automake-workalike that uses GNU Make features rather than a
  preprocessor.

This is what Quagmire aims to accomplish.  Currently it has
functionality equivalent to (and in many cases, taken directly from
:-) parts of Automake -- it supports the most common things (C, C++,
etc).  It also has some rudimentary support for a few configure-like
operations (though it still does, and always will, require at least a
minimal autoconf-produced configure).

The syntax is about as close to Automake's as possible -- primaries,
directory prefixes, etc.  (FWIW I never considered the syntax among
Automake's problems -- I still think it is very reasonable.)

Of course, Quagmire is not for everybody.  GNU make is an absolute
requirement -- in fact, Quagmire currently requires 3.81, the latest
release.  But, if you don't mind this dependency, you might consider
Quagmire.

Here's the hosting location:

    http://code.google.com/p/quagmire/

And the mailing list:

    http://groups.google.com/group/quagmire-discuss


If you are interested in discussing Quagmire, its direction, its
pointlessness, whatever -- I would suggest moving to the Quagmire list
so as not to disturb this list too much.

thanks,
Tom