“If you've used Make, you're used to creating Makefiles. In them, you manually build this immense graph where all of the parts hopefully add up to a working program.”<p>Actually, I used to generate rules using gcc -MM which does pretty much this: track dependencies in sources files using #include directives.<p>Nevertheless, I'm happy to see that the idea of automatically handling dependencies is still being worked on. I'd be so happy to trash all this scons config files we have to maintain on a near-daily basis.
Ah makefiles. It's 2014 and they still can't handle spaces in directory names.<p><a href="http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?712" rel="nofollow">http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?712</a><p>I'm pretty sure that trying to replace them at this point is sacrilege.
Really diggin the idea of using include files to figure out dependencies. Also seems ideal for beginners: look up the number of questions on SO asking 'which library to include for xxx.h' by people who don't yet grasp the difference between compiling and linking. Here you just say 'hey, I have this header, that's for this lib', directly. But it won't be for me though (well, this version at least, who knows what the future brings): it puts constraints on the directory structure used and on how you include your files. And is probably gcc only. Yielding basically none of my projects a candidate for testing this. But still, nice.
I really like the idea and having read the manual I think it's something that I want. However, it doesn't seem to be open source so how do I know that I can trust the binaries? The binary download is also over HTTP and not HTTPS.
Looks quite promising!
But:
"It will sniff out all of the objects which also need to be built to make it work, and it will build them first."
Seems like every source file will always be compiled regardless whether it has changed since the last build or not. So it's just for rather small projects.
cool!<p>A comment for the ROOT users (<a href="http://root.cern.ch/" rel="nofollow">http://root.cern.ch/</a>) amongst you HN readers: this appears to be very similar to 'ckon' which emerged from my PhD since 2011, and takes the humongous headache out of building C++ software modules within the ROOT analysis framework: <a href="http://tschaume.github.io/ckon/" rel="nofollow">http://tschaume.github.io/ckon/</a><p>@rachelbythebay: Since 'ckon' uses the same principles as your depot build tool, I thought you might be interested to take a look: <a href="https://github.com/tschaume/ckon" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/tschaume/ckon</a> :-)
Seems cool!<p>Anyone knows if the "everything for your project must be contained within a single directory root" constraint can be tricked using symbolic links?