Re: [ANN] Bou - a Lua-based Build System

["steve donovan" <steve.j.donovan@...>]

On 2/9/08, Brandon Van Every <bvanevery@gmail.com> wrote:
> CMake didn't begin life as play

But a lot of serious things started as play, like Linux.

A more considered answer: thinking of the 'open source big picture'.
People don't mind downloading multimegabyte tar balls, we have the
bandwidth and 'small is beautiiful' got lost in the process (Perhaps
it's still true, for a suitable definition of 'small').  But what
irritates them is having to chase down dependencies.  Cmake comes in
at 3.7 Meg (windows exe zip), which is fairly fat extra dependency.
Whereas a small Lua build engine could easily fit in 150K, and thus is
small enough to be part of the package.

I take your point about NIH (one of my new year resolutions is not to
reinvent wheels unnecessarily) but there is a serious purpose in
experimentation - it's called 'research'.

steve d.

(not actually defending a pet project, just the principle!)