Hey nixers!

I figured we never really talked about build systems in there, even though it is quite essential for any programming project, which one do you use and/or like, and why?

here is my personnal list:

make
The one I use, yet not my preferred one. Makefile are known by most programmers, packagers, and is well defined and documented. It allow compiling programs in any language quite easily, and even more.

But make has (too?) many implementations, each using not standard tricks that are not cross platform, and that make the compilation process tedious in some cases (eg, from linux to bsd). Also, one of its major advantage, implicit rules, is also one of its major disadvantage, as it can.lead to unexpected behaviors. The macro expansion is also pretty weird in make, leading to a few headaches if you don't wrap your head around that.

mk
The plan 9 build system. Everything make has, but with predictability! The syntax is quite similar to make's, except that nothing is implicit, and recipes are passed "as is" to the underlying shell. All variables are passed/acquired from the environment, which is a nice plus.
Currently my preferred build system (but I still provide makefiles, for accessibility). If you're curious, here is a project that has both a makefile and an mkfile: http://git.z3bra.org/sick/files.html

redo
Something I'd like to try, as it sounds great, but that is quite different from what everyone is used to. It is based on recursivity, and this paper will explain how it works better than me: http://cr.yp.to/redo.html