While there was no 'conclusion' to this thread, if I had to come up with one, it would be that we have a bunch of build tools which are all not amazing at this point in time. We have some DSL-based build tools and some ocaml-based build tools, and all of them need a lot of love to get to a good state.
My personal view is that we (as a community) should work at getting at least one DSL tool to be really great. I'm sure Jenga (an ocaml-based tool which seems more like a build-tool engine) will continue to be developed by Jane Street no matter what, so is there a DSL-based build system that we can converge on to use and improve? The contenders for this slot appear to be omake, obuild, and ocp-build. I'm more than willing to switch to one of these if I know that other people will as well, and that it will be actively developed (preferably on github). More users = more invested parties = more development potential. Conversely, continuing to spread the community's attention between these tools (as well as ocamlbuild, which seems destined to stagnate) before any one of them is top notch seems to me to be detrimental to ocaml's health as an ecosystem.
BTW Anil: is assemblage supposed to be an entire build toolchain, or is it only supposed to write makefiles (as the description in the readme states)?
-Yotam