Support for generating Makefiles/CMake_files/...

[dumblob]

First I'd like to thank you for creating ekam - I always wanted to create a tool intercepting calls and figuring out what's going on with the buggy build. This tool though automates the whole process, which is awesome!

Anyway, this tool would be very useful even for projects which don't want to (or rather can't - which is IMHO vast majority of middle-sized and big projects) switch to ekam completely. Namely in a way, that ekam could pregenerate Makefile/CMake_files/... with "correct" dependencies, order of files etc.

Do you think such ekam client feature would make sense?

[kentonv]

Hi @dumblob,

Sorry for the slow reply. I was on vacation and am still digging my way out of my email backlog.

Yes, I've always intended that Ekam should eventually generate makefiles, or perhaps a build script. Unfortunately, I do not expect that we'll have the time to implement that in the foreseeable future, as we have a lot on our plates here at Sandstorm.

One major complication: Since Ekam determines dependencies empirically, it is hard for it to know what might be different on a different system. The generated build scripts would end up highly specialized to your specific system, distribution, set of installed dependencies, versions, etc. So probably you'd have to tell users: "Here are a bunch of scripts for common setups. Choose the script that seems closest to your system, but if it doesn't work, you'll need to install Ekam."