This kind of thing helps when you're part of a big team and you're in the position to choose the build system for your code but I'm part of a small group and a

This kind of thing helps when you're part of a big team and you're in the position to choose the build system for your code but I'm part of a small group and a lot more of my build engineering goes into integrating existing third-party packages. I generally write sucky wrappers around configure/autotools because none of the alternatives are good enough to justify the time required to switch to something better. So far the most promising systems I've seen that do the sort of stuff I want are Open Embedded's BitBake[1] and rPath's Conary[2], both of which look a little like Waf. I seriously considered throwing out my wrappers and switching to Conary a while back but it only works on Linux and I spend 1/2 my time on OSX. [1] - http://developer.berlios.de/projects/bitbake http://developer.berlios.de/projects/bitbake [2] - http://wiki.rpath.com/wiki/Conary http://wiki.rpath.com/wiki/Conary