Now in v2 - complete rework from v1
Because make is painful to use, and build scripts are too slow. Moonbuild aims to be a good compromise.
You should probably use http://gittup.org/tup/ instead if you want a good build system.
moonbuild reads a build file, usually Build.moon that is written in a Moonscript DSL to define its targets and variables.
It then builds a DAG for the dependancies of the targets you tell it to build.
Then, it tries building every target in the graph while respecting dependancies, possibly on multiple processes.
Essentially, it works the same way as make, just with a different language, you can compare the Build.moon and Makefile in this repo to see for yourself.
Because it's fast, based on lua, and making DSLs with it is relatively easy.
It's also a language I like a lot, so I might have been biased when choosing it.
It is available on luarocks with luarocks install moonbuild.
It is also recommended to install luaposix if you can, as it speeds it up a lot, or luafilesystem in case it isn't available.
You will need argparse and moonscript installed from luarocks, and luaposix or luafilesystem are recommended.
You can build moonbuild with itself: moon bin/moonbuild.moon -qjy.
This will leave the binary ready to be used as out/moonbuild (it will still depend on the library to be used).
The binary and library can then be installed with bin/moonbuild install.
You can combine these steps with moon bin/moonbuild.moon -qjy install which will build and install moonbuild.
Alfons can use the devel version of moonbuild directly from its sources, so alfons build and alfons install will work directly.
TODO