First let me say that I'm really excited about Code::Blocks. For the past couple of months I have been working on a cross platform IDE just like this. Orginaly I was developing the application with Qt. After being just annoyed at Qt because of their licencing I decided to give a second look to wxWidgets.. anyways Code::Blocks is being developed in the same fashion that I was developing. A moduled framework around existing development tools. So I'm excited to jump into the code and start contributing.
However I think that Code::Blocks is a good example of why plain Makefile's are not a good solution for a complex project. There is a lot of greif in compiling Code::Blocks at the moment. (Maybe not for some people) but I haven't got a working compile yet (Linux, wxWidgets 2.6.1, with unicode support). I'm also running an AMD64 chip. All of this amounts to me having to edit the Makefile and other build files to compile (unicode aside as that is a code issue).
The point here is that I think the project needs to move to sane build enviornment. On a linux machine a Autoconf and other Autotools would do the trick.. but this presents a problem since Code::Blocks (to my knowledge) is supposed to be a cross platform code base.
So my suggestion. SCons. It is a cross platform building script based around python. Now I'm not a huge python fan, but SCons does the trick rather nicely. Using SCons would allow the project to configure it's self for different version of wxWidgets, Different O.S., and in the future different build options for various *features* that may become available in the future.
As an initiative I'm will construct a SCon's file to build the current CVS tree (this will require me to recompile wxGTK without unicode support
, but I will make that sacrifice).
Any other suggestions?