[jamming] Complete, and utter automation with Jam

[Daniel White]

Hi all,

I'm a relative newbie to C and to make/jam in general, but I am unhappy
using an IDE to work in, which is why I would love to get to grips with
make, jam, kjam, or one of the other variants.

Unfortunately, as I have found out, it can be cumbersome to maintain
the make/jamfile, and Make does little to alleviate the situation.
That's when I found Jam, and the page at:
http://www.perforce.com/jam/jam.html

It's very good, and a definite improvement over make, but unfortunately,
I still have to type in all the names of the source files!
I want to be able to just specify the name of the file with the main
function, along with the compiler arguments, and that's it. Jam (and
all the other make clones) should be able to automatically scan the
source code to see what other .c or .h files depend on it. This
should be trivial. I shouldn't have to worry about adding these names
in manually. Computers are very good at automation, humans are not.

Sorry if this seems like a rant. You'd think there'd be something
out there that could do what I want. Perhaps there is? Or maybe
even Jam could do it? If any of you could point me to a make clone
which does this, I'd be very grateful.

Just to make it totally clear, I'll explain a hypothetical situation.
I have three source files.
#include "main.c"
#include "data.h"
#include "data.c"

The main.c file has an include for "data.h", so it should know that it has
to link to data.c. A human should NOT have to type in data.c into the  
jamfile.
Instead Jam should look through the source to check these things out. In
summary, this would allow me to have one Jamfile for all projects  
(excluding
compiler arguments, which I think I could move to the source code anyway -
maybe someone here knows how? ).

Hope someone can help.

Cheers,
Daniel
-- 
www.skytopia.com