Suggestions wanted for building and installing large systems.

[ocratato]

I am looking for some ideas on the best way to build, distribute and install a moderately large system.

The project consists of an Eclipse workspace with several component projects. These are mostly C++ built with CDT/autotools, scripts, and one Java program. There will be various libraries as well as programs and configuration files, data files, etc.

In the long term I expect to create an RPM to package it, but was looking for something that would just use tar during the development and test phase of the project. I also intend to upload to SourceForge at some point - once there is a working set of stuff.

My current plan is to build a master project, within the Eclipse workspace, containing scripts and makefiles that would build the system, as well as run configure for each project, etc.

This seems like a far amount of work and it would be useful if I could build on what others have done, or at least not make the same mistakes.

(For anyone that is interested, you can see more details of the project by searching for SASSY on my blogspot blog, "Rambling on Software Architecture"
http://ocratato.blogspot.com.au/2011...roduction.html )

[ocratato]

I have found part of the answer in that autotools handles nested projects quite well.
See this: http://www.gnu.org/software/automake...bpackages.html

However, I am still a bit confused about how best to handle the Java components of the project.