I’m not the biggest fan of build systems. They’re a neccesary evil and the fact that yT were having so much difficulty with differing system (and so they felt a need to fork the code into their own private repo) isn’t a huge surprise.

Be tried to overcome this with a set of makefile-engines that could be easily used. They’re a sensible way to go and when we only had a single BeOS platform they were fine, but now we have a myriad of options and so without a lot of work getting a build to use all the available options isn’t as straightforward as it should be. Like a lot of things that Be did they’re in need of an update.

So, while I’m not really a fan of having things imposed, maybe having a standard way of getting an app ready to be built from source would be a good idea whose time has come. Ideally it should be similar to the way that FreeBSD’s ports works but I’m not sure that this is easily attainable without a lot of work. People need a lot of encouragement to work on build systems, especially one’s that are as complex as the ports tree scripts would become.

I suggested a somewhat simpler approach in #beclan but was told that yT already have a solution in use. My thoughts on this were fostered by a desire to try and help them with their apparent problems, but as they seem to have it covered I guess there’s no need to persue it is ithere?

Maybe one day they’ll make available their solution for all, but until then happy building!