On just about any project that is larger than hello world you are going to want some kind of tool that can automate all the steps required to build a program. In general we give the name build sytem to the various compenents that go in to generating the final program. Build systems are probably up there with revision control systems as one of the most important software engineering tools. In this first post of a series about build systems I'm going to try and put together some of the requirements that a project’s build system should have.

So what is a build system? Basically, something that takes in the project source and generates the project artifacts (generally programs, libraries, tarballs, etc).

Before getting too far into the discussion is useful to draw the distinction between a project’s build system and the underlying build tool (e.g: make, scons, etc). This post is primarily about the former, not the latter. Of course the choice of tool can make it easier or harder to achieve the goals of the project’s build system, but it is possible to build good or bad systems regardless of the underlying tool.