Using aap with pkg-config

Hi all,

First a little introduction:
I'm looking for a replacement for automake/autoconf/make and everything 
that is related with that toolchain. I've really tried to understand all 
of it, but every time when I think that I have it figured out I run into 
another problem. Most of all I'm put off by the fact that all the files 
that are needed are spread all over the place. I like the Visual Studio 
(heresy!) approach: one file that contains everything: the files to 
compile, the settings for that, ...
Being a long-time vim user I heard about a aap quite a while ago. 
However I have only today started reading its documentation, sample 
recipes and mailing lists in an attempt to understand its possibilities 
and limitations to assess aap for my purposes.
The project I want to try it on is a gtk/libglade application. Autoconf 
(maybe automake? who knows...) has support for the pkg-config style of 
specifying include- and lib directories but it wasn't clear to me from 
reading the aap manual how to do that in aap. Using Python commands or 
is there a more specialized way? Basically I'd like to do the following 
from aap:

gcc -Wall -g helloworld.c -o helloworld `pkg-config --cflags gtk+-2.0` \
`pkg-config --libs gtk+-2.0`

This is the build command from the Gtk tutorial. How do I do this?

The other question I have is related to splitting the main.aap file. I 
have in my project-directory a subdirectory called src. I would like to 
have only 1 aap file (at the top-level) but when I am in the src 
subdirectory and I type 'aap' without arguments I'd like to build only 
the files in that directory. Granted, this isn't possible with any build 
tool that I know of, but this would (for me) be a great feature. The way 
I see it is that aap, when invoked from a directory where no main.aap 
file is present, would go up the directory tree until it finds such a 
file, and then search for a target (make-lingo, would that be a 
'variant' or a 'dependency' in aap?) with the name of the directory it 
was invoked from, 'src' in this case, and then execute that target (so 
build all files in the src subdir, and link the object files to the 
final executable).
The alternative to this approach would of course be to have a main.aap 
file in the top-level and the src directories, but this would in the end 
lead to multiple files spread across all directories of the project, and 
that's the mess I'm trying to get away from...
And then one final question: are there any standard recipes that do all 
the same checks that a standard configure script do? I've seen the :conf 
  command but I'm not looking forward to list all the checks that 
configure scripts do by hand.

Thanks in advance for all answers.

cheers,

roel



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