Perhaps I got task automation wrong, but I didn’t directly think of building software. More like: automate all from LaTeX runs over data acquisition to automate simulation setups. For this also plain python would perhaps work or some other tools? Has to be platform independent though as many of us still are forced to on or the other operating system.
For building software I heard about CMake.

@Jochen Building software is one special case (albeit a common one) of task automation: automating LaTeX runs etc. is much the same.

I’m looking forward to the lecture! I would perhaps have chosen some kind of make-derivate for automating LaTeX but not necessarily for the other tasks.

We started with gmake for our scientific software project and it was powerful enough to get through about two years worth of work but then we had to consider something else. Especially since we needed to move to more platforms and use and test multiple languages.

Cmake so far has worked well for that next step. It is our main tool for this … we even have it handle doxygen and latex builds. It can generate gmake files. We see it being useful to automate running of various types of tests and drivers along with helping automate use of metric tools and report generating.

We heard of SCons but it seemed less appealing.

@DrBubba The problem with *Make (from our point of view) is that it requires some knowledge of the shell, which we don’t want to require. Ant/SCons/Rake don’t, and of those, SCons is the only one based on Python. Benjamin Smedberg (of Mozilla) is rumored to be working on a pure-Python reimplementation of Make, but I have no idea (a) if that’s true, or (b) if it would allow direct invocation of Python commands, bypassing the shell.

Yes, I missed that point before. I can appreciate it though in the context of what you are trying to accomplish.

Of course often when we try to take a path around one issue then we later run into complexity or complications that may well be worse than if we had gone through the issue to begin with. Only time will tell.

I have used Ant in some training classes but that was for Java. I found it to be very useful but of less value to me since we use C++ almost exclusively. I am still waiting to find a non-commerical version of Ant for C++.

Good luck.

@Greg: Ben Smedberg started a project called pymake, which is intended to be a pure-Python reimplementation of GNU make:

http://hg.mozilla.org/users/bsmedberg_mozilla.com/pymake/summary

The last time I checked though, it had significant shortcomings in terms of compatibility and performance, so it may not be appropriate for your uses here, at least not if you want to avoid being continually surprised by yet-another-feature-that-pymake-doesn’t-support-yet.