[Vala] Building a build tool

[Phil Housley <undeconstructed gmail com>]

I've been messing around with a little build tool recently (well,
actually not that recently, but I've not had any time for a couple of
months,) aiming to build primarily Vala apps and libraries. Generally
it's a bit inspired by Maven, so you declare some units to build, and
let the tool decide what actually needs to be done.

I have a couple of thousand lines of code so far, which is able to
build itself, using multiple threads, based on a simple configuration
file.  It discovers source files and compiles them, gathers the
outputs and queues C compiler tasks to do the next stage, and so on.
It's fairly cute, but not massively useful so far.

> From here, I'm not sure exactly where to go, so I'd be interested in
knowing what people here might want in a new build tool.  I'd like to
give it a plugin system to allow running different sorts of tasks, but
only within a standard build process.  The aim will always be that as
little as possible has to be configured.

Really the next step should probably be to enable testing, but I'm
stuck there as well.  Which test frameworks are currently active for
Vala, and what execution models are they using?  I'd very much like
testing Vala code to be as easy as in Java, so I'm aiming for the tool
to be able to discover tests and generate any harnesses required.

Also, I need to push the code somewhere, probably on launchpad, so I
need a name.  Currently I'm calling it Valapillar, but that's a pretty
obscure joke even to me, and I know why I chose it.

Sorry for the rambling, message.

Thoughts?

-- 
Phil Housley