Cons is a Perl-based software construction tool (i.e., substitute for make). It offers a number of features not found in make or other build tools, including integrated dependency analysis (no more "make depend" to generate static lists of .h files), complete dependency analysis across multiple directories, multiple side-by-side variant builds, compilation from code repositories, MD5 signatures instead of time stamps for determining whether a file is up-to-date, and extensibility via Perl.
