Minuteman is primarily a meta-build system, with some supporting workspace and package management facilities. It's intended to obviate the home-grown "build script" one inevitably creates for a complicated software system. Minuteman is something like "zc.buildout"--though it's really closer to the Java tool "maven"--and in a sense it's very similar the Gentoo package manager "portage". In other words, it's hard to describe. Usually it takes a lot of talking and waving my arms around. Therefore it's perfect fodder for a poster session.

Minuteman is written in Python 3, though it isn't strictly necessary to write any Python 3--or even know any Python--in order to use it. (Though user extensions must also be written in Python 3.)

Minuteman supports:

• build settings,
• self-documenting projects,
• flexible versioning,
• automated checkout from revision control systems,
• build concurrency,
• iterative development,
• a frankly shocking depth of extensibility,
• and the fully-automatic creation of repeatable builds.