Build System

A modular hierarchical GNU-make based build system.

Main features

• Hierarchical yet not recursive
• Modular
• Builds outside the source tree
• Fully parallel and dependencies tracked

Usage

• Download the cxxblocks/build, if you plan to have project-specific plugins (below assumes you do) then store it outside your project tree
• Create a symlink to .../build/makefile at the top of your project directory tree (just above “src” directory).
• Optionally create build/plugins/*.mk on the same level as the symlink in #2, the build system will source all these files on startup.
• In each folder participating in the build under src there should be a file rules.mk. It can be empty in which case the target living in the folder will be a PHONY echo target. To make it do something more than logging two variables should be defined in the rules.mk: TARGET_NAME and TARGET_TYPE. The former defaults to the name of the bottom most enclosing directory, the latter is a plugin name to be used for the build and defaults to PHONY. A third variable TARGET_DEPENDS lists (comma or space separated) targets which the current target depends on.

###Plugins There is no plugin API as such, build system just includes all *.mk files from build/plugins, leaving user the full freedom of injecting whatever code to the build system should the need exists.

###Builders Builder is a form of plugin used to build normalized targets. It can be almost anything, but must define two macros BUILDERS_<name>_CODE and BUILDERS_<name>_ARGS. The former should be a function taking a single argument, the target name; the latter should be a list of arguments the target should export in order to be build-able by this builder.

The below example defines the builder DUMMY taking a single argument MESSAGE from from the target, echoing the message prefixed with the target name, and creating an empty file <target_name>.built in the working directory

MY_NAME:=DUMMY
$(info loading $$(MY_NAME) builder...)

BUILDERS_$(MY_NAME)_ARGS := SOURCES
define BUILDERS_$$(MY_NAME)_CODE
.PHONY: $(1)
$(1): $$(WORK_DIR)/$(1).built
     @echo "building $(1) with $$(MY_NAME): $$(TARGETS_$(1)_MESSAGE)"
$$(WORK_DIR)/$(1).built:
    @echo "building $$(WORK_DIR)/$(1).built with $$(MY_NAME)"
endef

$(info loaded $$(MY_NAME) builder)
undefine MY_NAME

The rules.mk in the target's source directory should look as follows to be built with the builder DUMMY

TARGET_NAME:=mytarget
TARGET_TYPE:=DUMMY
TARGET_MESSAGE:="test argument to pass into the builder"