On Wed, 3 Feb 2010, Faré wrote:
From experience I can tell you that precious little of what you propose will be implemented by anyone but yourself.
I understand that. Hence the "dream". But some parts of this are low-hanging fruit. In particular, I strongly recommend a generic config facility rather than the ad-hoc system we seem to be moving towards.
If I have a piece of advice, it would be: if you can find a way to write a CL plugin to OMake or Eclipse or GNU Make or autotools, or whatever, instead of recreating a whole build system, you win. I can tell you, recreating a whole build system sucks. And a very lonely job.
Trust me, we do not want to tie ASDF-N to any of the tools you mention. Autotools is a best-of-breed due to its years of refinement; but it is based on portable shell scripting (ick!). Portable CL is much better. In general, all these build tools are also tailored to other languages; so there is no real way to make a first-class lisp solution.
As for the suckiness of creating a build system, few guess how well I understand.
- Daniel
P.S. Currently higher on my priority list: getting ABLE running on mswinxp.