The Helix Ribosome build system is a set of programs written in the Python programming language which provide a common interface to retrieving, and building programs from source code stored in a CVS repository. The build system is made up of two basic subsystems. The first is the component which calculates the dependencies of a target, retrieves the source code, and runs commands to build that source code in the correct order. This is the program build. The second component in the build system is umake, a cross-platform Makefile generator. Umake can be used independently from the build program.