Software Build Systems: Principles and Experience

Part II. The Build Tools

Part I was an introduction to software build systems. You learned the basics of the GNU Make tool, considered the various components of a program, saw the compilation steps for three common programming languages, and explored subtargets and build variants.

However, aside from a few examples, you didn’t learn about build tools. Recall that a build tool orchestrates the use of compilation tools to generate a complete software product. A build tool performs the full build process by reading the build description and acting upon the instructions.

The second part of this book examines a number of build tools in detail. Each tool was chosen because of both its popularity and the fact that it represents a particular class of ...