At one time, there was a long-term goal for this global build script, or “project builder”. In conjunction with cvs-gather.pl, a semi-arbitrary collection of software packages would be downloaded and compiled. The commonality between them would be the use of configure scripts that would be invoked by the project builder. The dependencies would be specified through some configuration file, possibly written in XML, that would be constructed on the fly based on the cvs-gather.pl dependency file.

These lofty plans have not materialized, and it is unclear whether the need for such a tool still exists. Nonetheless, the idea of a highly generalized project builder played a key role in the way that configure.pl was written. In particular, its highly generic nature was motivated by the potential for downloading arbitrary source code and running a configure script. The makefile generated by configure.pl initially followed this goal, too, but it has since had its scope narrowed to deal with the specific conventions of the VR Juggler project.