'PHPMake'

ola, posted this on pear.general... probably more relevant here.. so: We've been using standard GNU make as part of binarycloud for a number of tasks - most not specific to binarycloud. The make system constructs cleanly structured build trees, changes permissions, etc. That system isn't really up to what we need to do in the future - we wanted something that was more flexible, not so quirky, etc. It's also inconvenient to force users to install a faux-gnu/unix environment on windows machines just to do a simple build. A Jakarta make tool called ANT came up on the bc-dev list, and we had a look. ANT is a pretty nice java make tool. I want to gauge the interest of the PEAR community in a native php build system that uses XML configuration files that would be somewhat similar to the ANT build.xml format. (see http://jakarta.apache.org/ant/index.html). I don't necessarily want to replicate ANT (it seems overly capable, actually - too complex) but it's a good basic model to work from. I'd rather have this be a generalized component outside the binarycloud source tree because I think it's a tool anyone building php apps could put to good use - and I'd love to have a platform agnostic build system to which we could easily add custom binarycloud-specific extension classes. The set of 'PHPMake' classes necessary to get a relatively simple system going is fairly small, also - which means we could get something up and running pretty quickly. I think this is perfect for PEAR (sort of a companion to PHPDoc), do you guys agree? best, _alex