I thought I'd send a quick note to introduce myself to the list and let you know about some messages I will be sending hopefully over the next couple of weeks. I am the author of a build system called abuild (www.abuild.org), which is similar to gradle in the spirit of what it tries to achieve but is primarily a C/C++ build tool and has no following outside of people that work for one of my previous employers. I had the pleasure of meeting Hans Dockter and Luke Daley a few weeks ago and having a phone conversation with Adam Murdoch and Luke shortly after that to discuss C and C++ builds and to share ideas. I am no longer doing any development on abuild, and I would love it if I could put a note on abuild's website that says, "If you're thinking about using abuild, use gradle instead. It does everything abuild does and much more." Right now, this is not quite the case. I've told people that for everything abuild does that gradle doesn't, there are about 100 things that gradle does and abuild doesn't, but there are still a few things in that first category that have to be taken care of!
I'm at a place in my life where I have extremely little free time to contribute to gradle (I have almost-two-year-old twins at home), but I want the deep thinking and experience that went into abuild to benefit gradle as much as possible. I think the best way for me to contribute is to post detailed ideas to this list including outlines of specific test cases or scenarios that a good C/C++ build system should be able to handle. I plan on putting some focused effort into this from 12/27 to 12/29 when I've scheduled some time off to work on this and some other open source efforts. At this moment, I don't have deep familiarity with gradle, but I'm hoping that will change. That means, for now, my contributions will probably be limited to prose, but maybe down the road, it can evolve into contributions of code or test cases. Abuild has a very thorough automated test suite. I think it would be great if gradle could pass all of abuild's tests that make sense in gradle. Abuild's test suite is implemented in qtest (qtest.qbilt.org), which is perl-based, so the test cases would have to be rewritten, but that's just as well since the whole framework is so different. For now, unless anyone would like to suggest a better way, I'll most likely go with posting a single message per topic and putting the string C++ concept in the subject. I have one item to post this morning (hooray for insomnia) but probably won't have time for much more until next week. I look forward to getting more involved and hope these posts will be useful. --Jay -- Jay Berkenbilt <[email protected]> --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe from this list, please visit: http://xircles.codehaus.org/manage_email
