My pal Owen (who, incidentally, is doing some wonderful work on CONGO) has just written an excellent high level of of build system philosophy entitled Nobody Cares about your Build. If you’re a developer or release engineer, or are just plain curious about build systems, check it out – here’s a sample:
A reliable, comfortable build system has measurable benefits for software development. Being able to build a testable, deployable system at any point during development lets the team test more frequently. Frequent testing isolates bugs and integration problems earlier, reducing their impact. Simple, working builds allow new team members to ramp up more quickly on a project: once they understand how one piece of the system is constructed, they can apply that knowledge to the entire system and move on to doing useful work. If releases, the points where code is made available outside the development team, are done using the same build system that developers use in daily life, there will be fewer surprises during releases as the âreleaseâ? build process will be well-understood from development.
