Re: build and configuration system

I just talked with Martin about possible solutions for our build system.
After some discussion, we found that we have the following requirements:

   * We want autoconf/automake on linux, because it's simply *the*
      standard (makes it easy for others) and because we need some kind
      of configuration management anyway

   * We want to enable comfortable development under windows, which
      means that it is possible to use some IDE (probably visual studio
      >= 7)

The current bjam stuff works ok, but we still need configuration
and it does not solve the windows problem.

So we came to the conclusion that we have 2 main alternatives:

   1) Create and maintain both Makefile.ams and visual studio project
      files (and possibly some other build system for mac os x)

   2) Build those files automatically from one build-specification
      (i.e. configure.ac, the automake files and the visual studio files
       are built automatically)

The first approach proved to be quite annoying (this is what we did
in the now stable GePhex branch), so we looked closer at the second.
This promises to be some work, but has some nice advantages:
   * it should be possible to add support for different build systems
     later
   * could be easier to manage than all those distributed tiny automake
     files

Now the big question is wether there exists a tool that can do what we 
want, or wether we have to code it ourselves.
Does anybody know something like that?

Regards,

Georg