Old projects never die, they just fade away….

Until someone asks you about it and shows a little interest. At that point they get dusted off and made to work again. In fact, often they get all spruced up and have majout portions rewritten to work better, fixing a lot of the annoyances that were there when work stopped. A fresh pair of eyes is often a good thing!

Such is the case with butter. Will asked me about it the other day and having a bit of time this weekend I thought I’d have a quick look at it. It took a little while to get compling on FreeBSD, but once that was done work proceeded along at a good pace. Many of the small niggles with the old code have been fixed and the whole thing is now more streamlined and works better than it ever has.

I’ve made even mroe use of sections in the Recipes file which provides for a lot more functionality with little cost. To allow for different versions of the languages (c vs c++) I’ve also added the ability to specify a language for a target. If there is a section named for that language in the template it is run prior to the template being used. This should maybe be moved to the point at which we apply the templte, but I’ll wait and see if I find use cases for that.

The latest code is all in subversion. The install/uninstall code still hasn’t been tested, but I’ll try and get to that soon.

Update:
Mads was critical of the lack of a url for information on butter, but it wasn’t there as the information was so horribly out of date. I’ve started rectifying that and so the url is http://www.david-reid.com/projects/butter/ for anyone who wants more information.