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Meh.

Linux and BSD build systems deal with most of these issues usually with wide support of a variety of recursive makes. Though RPM, DEB honestly suck and never really tried to solve issues automatically. Still drives me nuts that packages are tainted by the 'gold' systems they are built on. The complexity of build systems means very few minds are up for it and most solutions are naive and end up with tons of patchy exceptions and work arounds.

ROCK Linux supported cross compiler capabilities and auto-detection of build parameters and dependency library tracking. (I was working on automated dependency ordering and QEMU based full cross builds, before I got a real job.) It was very robust and outside package developers breaking their own builds it worked solidly. No idea what cool things T2 Linux got up to after ROCK, but maintaining a fresh build system is hard. Build systems are always going to be fragile systems with complexity. The paper seems to be a survey of what they learned vs. definitely having any solution.




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