Build Systems

Managing and building software packages is a big task. There are a few options on what build system you can use. Windows users prefer Visual Studio 'solutions' and 'projects', *nix users prefer Makefiles. Ideally, cross-platform tools are what everyone wants.

Some popular choices include:

• CMake - a 'cross-platform' make, popular with a lot of projects. (We use it in PAL thanks to Benoit Neil's contributions). My gripe with CMake is its complexity. The fact that there is a complete book to describe it is a scary thought.
  
• Premake - is a less popular choice (a few large projects use it, eg: ODE, PAL previously used it). It uses Lua-script, and it is my personal favourite due to its simplicity whilst still being very powerful. Premake is a bit windows-orientated, which helped me as I came from a Windows development background.
  
• bjam, the boost build system. I've not used this one too much, but it is apparently decent.
  
• scons, a python-based build system. I've not used it much, but it seems quite complex. (Evan Drumwright developed an scons build system for a PAL benchmark tool)
  

Premake (4) is quite easy to use, below is a very simple template for its use:

solution "NAME"
 configurations {"Debug", "Release"}
 targetdir "bin"
 language "C++"
 location "build"
 includedirs {"src", "."}

project "NAME"
 kind "ConsoleApp"
 files {"src/*.cpp"}
 links {"lib"}

Simply invoke with "premake vs2008" for windows, or "premake gmake" under *nix.
The lua script lets you easily extend the script to copy DLL's, set up custom include paths for each user, etc, etc.

This should help you get started with cross-platform build solutions!