Exact Build project is a sane GNU Auto replacement. For portable build systems nowadays normally GNU autoconf and the associated companiens such as automake and libtool. However albeit portable they are rather crufty to use. The various macro expansion and generation steps extremely blow up the initial definitions and make execution slow and debugging a nightmare.

Even with the enourmous code bloat, it does not have a wide feature set and neither allows to maximize the gain of parallel builds nor other state-of-the-art compiler features. Manual tinkering is needed in such cases.

Mostly due the code bloat but also to obtain features such as mximal parallel build and object output seperated cleanly from the source, we create our own set of Makefiles for the non-recursive build system and shell scripts for configuration, if required by the software module (some straight forware code does come without a configure script at all).