Today I decided to tackle the Io build system. It's a bit of a mess, consisting of several hand-rolled Makefiles with lots of platform-specific definitions and conditions.

I decided I had three main options:

1. Do a cleanup on the existing Makefiles
2. Try to get Automake working
3. Switch to a newer build system such as Rake or SCons

Steve Devortke told me he'd prefer keeping the existing system unless it could be shown that using an alternative was less work.

I decided to give SCons a try, just to get a feel. A few hours later, I've got a working io_static. I seriously cannot believe how easy SCons is to use. I haven't written a Makefile that's over a dozen lines in years and I was dreading it. SCons makes it effing easy.

I understand the desire to stick to known toolchains as much as anyone, but if you don't give SCons a try you are seriously shorting yourself. I didn't try Rake, but if it's nearly as good as SCons you can't go wrong either way.