This week was hack week for all the Open Source hackers at Novell, where we got to work on ideas and projects that we were personally interested in. I decided to work on something that I've been planning for a long time, ever since I joined the Mono project, in fact: add support for Mono in Automake.
It has been a while since I hacked on the automake source tree, but I didn't have too much trouble getting started. In the end, I got most of the features I intended for it:

• support for building Mono exes and dlls
• support for installing them in the GAC
• support out-of-tree builds
• dependency tracking on sources
• support for specifying resources, and tracking dependencies on them
• support for specifying references, and tracking dependencies on them
• support for multiple languages, include C#, VB.NET, Nemerle, Boo
• easy extensibility of the support to other languages -- essentially, just need to add the filename extension of the language to SUFFIXES
• bundled autoconf macro to detect installed compilers and other tools
• ... and some examples, test cases, and documentation to explain how to use all of it

Stuff missing include

• autoconf macros to detect if libraries are installed or not
• support for Microsoft's compilers -- basically a question of replacing '/' with '\' in filenames, where appropriate
• support for response files -- mainly wrt distributing sources mentioned in them
• real life experience with actual projects using all the above features

The whole effort took up most of the five days. I spent much of Monday checking out the code from CVS into git and looking at how support for C and other languages was implemented. I had most of the basic support done by Tuesday, got all dependency tracking working by Wednesday, and added documentation, autoconf support, and GAC-installation support by Friday afternoon. I'm very happy that I spent the time upfront to import the project into git, since it saved me from spending a lot of timeslices tracking my changes.
The code is available as a series of patches to Automake (packed conveniently in a tarball), and there's also an example project that shows how to use it. I also have a "lightning talk" short video about the project.

As much as I enjoyed the coding, I also thoroughly enjoyed working with the whole Bangalore open source team, all in the same conference room for five days, with everyone having a good time, and good food.