New Build Tool: fabricate.py

I stumbled onto a new build tool today: fabricate. I can't believe how cool it is, and that nobody has thought of it before (OK, actually, one person did, but still!). You give it a command, and it runs the command with strace and looks for all the files the command reads and produces and uses those as the command's dependencies and outputs, respectively. The next time you run the command with fabricate, if the outputs don't exist or the dependencies have changed it re-runs the command, otherwise, it doesn't. In other words, it does all the work that you normally would try and do with make, automatically.

Another cool thing about this is that it will work with anything. You don't have to write builders for it like you would for scons (another tool I looked at for a bit). I spent some time trying to get scons to run modelsim compiles and simulations for me, and it was way too hard to make it work. I just tried fabricate with a small modelsim job and it worked perfectly. I'm excited to play with fabricate some more.

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