About:
Cons is a Perl-based software construction tool (i.e., substitute for make). It offers a number of features not found in make or other build tools, including integrated dependency analysis (no more "make depend" to generate static lists of .h files), complete dependency analysis across multiple directories, multiple side-by-side variant builds, compilation from code repositories, MD5 signatures instead of time stamps for determining whether a file is up-to-date, and extensibility via Perl.

Author:
Steven Knight [contact developer]

Rating:	reset 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
8.52/10.00 (3 votes)

Homepage:
http://www.dsmit.com/cons/
Tar/GZ:
http://www.dsmit.com/cons/stable/cons-2.2.0.tgz
Changelog:
http://www.dsmit.com/cons/stable/CHANGES-2.2.0
RPM package:
http://www.dsmit.com/cons/stable/cons-2.2.0-1.noarch.rpm
Debian package:
http://www.dsmit.com/cons/stable/cons_2.2.0-1.deb
Mirror site:
http://www.gnu.org/software/cons/

Trove categories: [change]

[Development Status]		6 - Mature
[Intended Audience]		Developers
[License]		OSI Approved :: GNU General Public License (GPL)
[Programming Language]		Perl
[Topic]		Software Development, Software Development :: Build Tools

Dependencies: [change]
No dependencies filed

 Branches

Branch	Version	Last release	License	URLs
Default	2.2.0	27-Nov-2000	GNU General Public License (GPL)
Development	2.3.0	31-May-2001	GNU General Public License (GPL)

 Articles referencing this project

• Make alternatives
  by Adrian Neagu , in Category Reviews
  Sat, Jul 9th 2005 00:00
  
• Stop the autoconf insanity! Why we need a new build system.
  by Andrew McCall , in Editorials
  Sat, Jun 21st 2003 00:00
  

 Comments

[»] Looking for volunteers for Conversion from Makefiles to Conscripts
by Rajesh Vaidheeswarran - Aug 26th 2000 22:51:08

We are looking for volunteers to convert some popular programs to build with Cons.

If anyone has any ideas, or converted packages, I'd be glad to put them up on the cons web site for all to see and use.

Some of the targets that come to mind are:

• Optional Perl packages (like CGI, CGI::Lite) that use the perl Makefile.PL -> Makefile -> make to have a set of cons scripts be generated, instead.
• Some programs (like Emacs, or for that matter most GNU programs) that require the use of the configure script. If we can convert a couple of those, then we should be able to make a powerful case for cons.
• Conversion of programs that build Makefiles to be modified to generate Cons scripts instead is also strongly encouraged.
  The classic ones that come to mind are:

  • configure (or even autoconf)
  • A major win would be having Larry Wall's famous `Configure' script for perl generate Cons scripts (if, of course, perl already exists on the machine where we are attempting to build perl.)

Feel free to contact me with any ideas that you might have in this area.

--
http://www.dsmit.com/gpgkey.asc

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[»] Re: Looking for volunteers for Conversion from Makefiles to Conscripts
by Steve Fink - Sep 7th 2001 16:58:55


> Conversion of programs that build Makefiles to be modified to generate
> Cons scripts instead is also strongly encouraged.
> The classic ones that come to mind are:
>
> configure (or even autoconf) configure doesn't generate Makefiles. That's the most common target, but it still has to be explicitly listed in configure.in. configure merely replaces @VAR@ in somefile.in to produce somefile, for every 'somefile' listed in AC_OUTPUT.

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