Build automation is the act of scripting or automating a wide variety of tasks that software developers do in their day-to-day activities including things like:* compiling computer source code into binary code* packaging binary code* running tests...
tool - a program that assists in the automatic compilation and installation of other programs or libraries.
General
Portable to Unix and non-Unix systems
Lightweight
Offers a Turing-complete programming language (similar to SCons
SCons
SCons is a computer software construction tool that automatically analyzes source code file dependencies and operating system adaptation requirements from a software project description and generates final binary executables for installation on the target operating system platform...
)
Support for standard targets: configure, build, clean, distclean, install, and uninstall
C is a general-purpose computer programming language developed between 1969 and 1973 by Dennis Ritchie at the Bell Telephone Laboratories for use with the Unix operating system....
C++ is a statically typed, free-form, multi-paradigm, compiled, general-purpose programming language. It is regarded as an intermediate-level language, as it comprises a combination of both high-level and low-level language features. It was developed by Bjarne Stroustrup starting in 1979 at Bell...
Fortran is a general-purpose, procedural, imperative programming language that is especially suited to numeric computation and scientific computing...
is supported with automated detection of Module dependencies
Support for OCaml and hybrid programs, support for GNOME
GNOME
GNOME is a desktop environment and graphical user interface that runs on top of a computer operating system. It is composed entirely of free and open source software...
programs
Support for the D programming language (both gdc and dmd are supported)
Python is a general-purpose, high-level programming language whose design philosophy emphasizes code readability. Python claims to "[combine] remarkable power with very clear syntax", and its standard library is large and comprehensive...
DocBook is a semantic markup language for technical documentation. It was originally intended for writing technical documents related to computer hardware and software but it can be used for any other sort of documentation....
, man pages, intltool/msgfmt
Other
Colored output and progress bar display
Scripts are Python modules
XML script front-end and a dedicated, easy-to-parse "IDE output" mode to ease the interaction with integrated development environments
Modular configuration scheme with customizable command-line parsing
In computer programming, the verb glob or globbing is used to refer to an instance of pattern matching behavior. The noun "glob" is used to refer to a particular pattern, e.g...
-like) to ease script maintenance
Support for global object cache to avoid unnecessary recompilations
Support for unit tests run on programs at the end of builds
Requirements
No installation required: the waf script (only 95 KB
Kilobyte
The kilobyte is a multiple of the unit byte for digital information. Although the prefix kilo- means 1000, the term kilobyte and symbol KB have historically been used to refer to either 1024 bytes or 1000 bytes, dependent upon context, in the fields of computer science and information...
Python is a general-purpose, high-level programming language whose design philosophy emphasizes code readability. Python claims to "[combine] remarkable power with very clear syntax", and its standard library is large and comprehensive...
is an external dependency
History
Thomas Nagy created a build automation tool called BKsys which was designed to sit on top of SCons
SCons
SCons is a computer software construction tool that automatically analyzes source code file dependencies and operating system adaptation requirements from a software project description and generates final binary executables for installation on the target operating system platform...
, providing higher-level functionality similar to that of Autotools. When Thomas Nagy decided that SCons' fundamental issues (most notably the poor scalability) were too complex and time-consuming to fix, he started a complete rewrite
Rewrite (programming)
A rewrite in computer programming is the act or result of re-implementing a large portion of existing functionality without re-use of its source code. When the rewrite is not using existing code at all, it is common to speak of a rewrite from scratch...
KDE is an international free software community producing an integrated set of cross-platform applications designed to run on Linux, FreeBSD, Microsoft Windows, Solaris and Mac OS X systems...
project considered moving from Autotools to SCons and BKsys in its builds, but a year later the decision was made to instead use CMake
CMake
CMake is a cross-platform, open-source system for managing the build process of software using a compiler-independent method. It is designed to support directory hierarchies and applications that depend on multiple libraries, and for use in conjunction with native build environments such as Make,...
. Waf was still in a very early pre-alpha stage at that point.
Example Waf file
Below is a very simple wscript that would compile a source called "hello-world.c" using the platform default c-compiler:
top = '.'
out = 'build'
