Interesting, if Chris can pull this off it will change the world in a huge way. Having used the build system inside of Google it was somewhat mesmerizing, you really could put together things pretty easily. I suspect there is something similar inside Amazon. But I completely agree that Github has done wonders for making many smaller projects accessible it has not significantly increased our ability to tie them together. That seems to be part of the motivation for the CCAN effort as well, although on a more language specific vector. But as a proof of concept the CPAN system (the one for perl) demonstrates just how powerful this function can be in enabling large scale rapid development.

The flip side though, the monkey in the wrench as they say, is that the projects that participate have to conform to the rules of participation. In CPAN's case its a standardized dependency, build, and install models with required unit tests. So perhaps the first step here is to provide an incentive for clean build processes on a project.