buildit is a great piece of software.  unfortunately, it has some deficiencies, at least regarding things i want to do for topp.build.  maybe this is my lack of imagination concerning namespaces.  but lets dig in and do a post-mortem later.

variable resolution: [ priority: blocker ]

currently context doesn't take any global variables.  in addition, variables in the global section (at least) aren't resolved "in order".  that is, if i do

foo = bar
fleem = ${foo} 

this won't resolve:

>>> from buildit import context
>>> from StringIO import StringIO
>>> c = context.Context(StringIO("[globals]\nfoo=bar\nbaz=${foo}\n"))
No [globals] section in inifile <StringIO.StringIO instance at 0x2b58671d4320>
No [namespaces] section in inifile <StringIO.StringIO instance at 0x2b58671d4320>
>>> c.globals
{'username': 'jhammel', 'platform': 'linux-x86_64', 'buildoutdir': '/home/jhammel', 'cwd': '/home/jhammel'}
>>> c.interpolate('${baz}', None)
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in ?
  File "/usr/lib64/python2.4/site-packages/buildit/context.py", line 138, in interpolate
    task)
  File "/usr/lib64/python2.4/site-packages/buildit/resolver.py", line 211, in resolve_value
    name)
buildit.resolver.MissingDependencyError: <MissingDependencyError in section named None, option named None, value '${baz}', offender 'baz'>

Let's dissect the problem:

• Context.__init__:  this sets up builtins and calls file globals = resolve_file_section(inifile, 'globals', builtins)
• resolve_file_section:
  
  

InFileWriter doesn't resolve namespaces: [ priority: important ]

You can't resolve <<foo/bar>> , for instance

callbacks for targets:  [ priority: backburner ]

Currently, targets only check to see if files exist, ala make.  It would be great if in addition to this, you could have python tests for tasks.  For instance, is a module importable?