I'm finding that for compiling code usually it is the configuration that makes life hard rather than the build system part. I've been using cmake [1] which make

I'm finding that for compiling code usually it is the configuration that makes life hard rather than the build system part. I've been using cmake [1] which makes the rules to build object files, libraries, executables pretty simple although determining and adapting to the eccentricities of any arbitrary system's environment is painful. I am also liking snakemake[2] these days for running arbitrary chains of jobs that have dependencies (in addition to build system). It has a nice syntax, easy to build and run dependency graphs of different jobs and has built in multithread support and cluster integration if you want to scale up to bigger data sets. Very nice middle ground being much easier to maintain and rerun than a pile of shell scripts but much lighter weight than a whole hadoop "big data" setup. [1] http://www.cmake.org http://www.cmake.org [2] https://bitbucket.org/johanneskoester/snakemake/wiki/Home https://bitbucket.org/johanneskoester/snakemake/wiki/Home