Research projects with available code are useful, Open Source is awesome, Free Software is even more, but ultimately building any piece of software has never been as easy as one wish.
The fact is that there is such a miscellaneous of tools to build software that it becomes confusing to build. It wastes developers time and decreases code reuse. Some companies and projects keep a repository with all needed code, external binaries and create build scripts and configurations so that any developer can easily rebuild any part of the project. If you ever worked on such company or project, you know how useful those can be when compared to a miscellaneous of tools available on the wild.
As most developers I am not specially interested in building details, I just wish for a building system to work. Though as an engineer I do wonder what properties such system should have. On the rest of this post I try to specify what requirements I foresee:
