Nifty build tool

[mithriltabby]

Saw a demo from the folks at Runtime Design Automation; they have some interesting tools for dealing with software builds and testing, and provide integration with source control and bug tracking. The functionality includes something like distcc for doing massively parallel builds on build farms; particularly nifty is the fact that you can slip a wrapper tool into all your program calls from make and have it build up its dependency tree from your existing makefiles. (The makefile-esque things it generates are in Tcl, and you have to then edit those if you want to centralize abstractions again, but the basic structure is intact— you don’t have to agonizingly convert a large project all at once just to test the thing.) The licensing is even pretty reasonable— they just give you a site license and let all the developers run amok with it, subject to the limits of the build farm.

It’ll be interesting to find out how it performs; we’ll probably be evaluating it soon...