From: Lance Hankins [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > Any ammunition will be greatly appreciated :)
I can get you some research (that I think was from Sun) that showed that for a large system, 10% of the code was in the build process. But any metric of a large in house development system should give similar results. When you realise the size of the work done by the build engineers (and management rarely does) you have to stop and ask a) Why? b) How can we make this as productive as possible. If the build process is taking 10% of your code, then it deserves the same considerations as any other technical decision. Sure COBOL can be used to develop systems, it available, it's supported and it will work, but no one actually does that anymore. The world has moved on, and has found better tools to do the job. It's the same with build process. The build scripts are *part of your product*. Forcing people do use make for them, when there are better options is as irresponsible as forcing people to use COBOL. There are better tools than make. Including jam/cons/ant.
