[m_mueller]

Thank you! Seems to me like a sane and clean concept, i.e. how autotools and co always should have been. I'm quite fond of writing Makefiles myself, so that wouldn't be an issue. When I get around to rewriting the build system for my GPU code preprocessor framework [1] I think I'll give bsdowl another look - it's possible that it would fit quite well and reduce the amount of build system code I have to maintain myself.

[1] https://github.com/muellermichel/Hybrid-Fortran

edit: Ah there is something I missed though: BSD Make only will probably be an issue. My stuff mostly has to work on HPC GPU clusters which are pretty much exclusively Linux based, so GNU Make support is a must I think. Do you have any plans on supporting this so it becomes portable to Linux?

[michipili]

bmake is very portable and it is available on Debian and Ubuntu. I am not aware of any RPM package but installing from sources is a breeze, I had it running on the newest CentOS as well as on paleontological Solaris editions, without having to tweak a single line of code.

If you look for a more engineered installation solution, give a try to PKGSRC, which is the (portable) ports tree of NetBSD – though I never used it intensively. This even used to work in a (now obsolete) Unix-like environment on windows.

When you'll find time to experiment with the Makefiles, feel free to get in touch (my email is in the source, or with the issue tracker) I will be happy to help.

[m_mueller]

See, the problem with that is the friction it causes in a HPC environment. Usually, users have no access to a package manager - so everything you want in addition to what's provided by administrators is something you have to build from source, in your home folder, including all the dependencies. And getting administrators to install new software on such a cluster can be difficult in itself. Adoption of new programming languages and libraries is slow in this space mostly for that reason I think, and if you want to have a successful framework, you need to provide it with basically no dependencies attached apart from what you typically find on these systems. Don't forget, the users typically aren't computer/software engineers, they are scientists in my case. I.e. stubborn people who don't particularly care for software if it doesn't directly help in what they're doing ;).

[michipili]

Also, I forgot to point out, I have an autoinstall script for bmake and bsdowl, it is here:

     https://github.com/michipili/anvil/blob/master/subr/anvil_travisci_autoinstall.sh

It will install both of them under ~/.local, so that you need to tweak your path accordingly, but you can choose another prefix with the `-p` flag, like

  sh anvil_travisci_autoinstall.sh -p "${HOME}"

If you want to customise it, you can trim most of the script (autoinstall_opam*) because you do not need this. :) And if you need something more specific, just ping me on the issue tracker for instance. :)

[m_mueller]

Hey thanks, that looks promising. I appreciate your help. I'll be busy with other stuff until around end of this year, but at some point I have to make my builds more flexible (allow any number of targets in the configurations / autodetect what's available on the machine). I'll look into it then.

[michipili]

You can bribe your colleagues by showing them how cleanly it handles LaTeX documents and METAPOST figures, in case they use METAPOST for their technical drawings. :) And the clean target leaves everything you need to send your file to an editor (i.e. it does not remove bibliography files, index, and figures, which are removed by a more powerful realclean command.)