buildalso

Buildalso is a term used in software engineering to describe an approach or tooling that generates multiple build outputs from a single source tree within a unified build process. The goal is to ensure consistency across targets—such as different operating systems, architectures, or package formats—without duplicating work in separate pipelines.

Origin and usage: The concept arose in discussions of modern build automation where teams maintain matrices of targets. In practice, buildalso can be implemented as a manifest or configuration that defines a graph of build tasks and their dependencies, and as a runner that orchestrates these tasks in parallel where possible.

Key features: declared task graph, multi-target outputs, reproducible builds, cache and artifact management, integration with existing CI systems, and support for incremental builds.

Typical workflow: a developer commits source; the build system resolves the graph, executes tasks for all required targets, caches results, and publishes artifacts; logs and metadata are captured for traceability.

Advantages and challenges: Benefits include reduced duplication, consistent cross-target artifacts, and faster adaptation to new targets; challenges include increased configuration complexity, cache coherence issues, and potential longer initial build times.

See also: reproducible builds, multi-target build, cross-compilation, CI/CD.