A lot of people are interested in prototyping alternate build backends for mozilla-central. It is difficult to do this today because our build system makes a lot of assumptions about there being only one build backend: recursive make files. This tracking bug should be blocked by all bugs that stand in the way of making alternate build backends difficult to implement. At this juncture, the main issues are: 1) Ensuring the build config files (typically Makefile.in's) consist of only simple variable assignment and no make-isms. This makes them easily machine readable, facilitating other build backends to extract information and do whatever they want with it. 2) Ensuring things like autoconf/configure are flexible and allow alternate build backends. e.g. configure today always writes Makefiles. Pieces need to be configurable and not assume Makefiles are the only show in town.

Blog posts related to this bug and its dependencies: http://gregoryszorc.com/blog/2013/02/28/moz.build-files-and-the-firefox-build-system/ http://coop.deadsquid.com/2012/07/reviving-buildfaster-plan-of-attack/

We've done a lot of work in this area, I don't think we're going to end up using this as a tracking bug.