Builder 0.9 Readme


1. Description

Builder is a program for building other programs, similar to make, scons and
others.  Its main design goals are minimizing duplication of configuration
between packages and being as fast as possible.  Features include integrated
configuration and dependency resolution C sources.


2. Building Builder

Builder is normally built using itself.  However, if you just downloaded the
source and don't yet have a Builder binary, how is that possible?  To resolve
this problem, there's a script called bootstrap.sh in the Builder main
directory.  Before running it, make sure you have the following libraries
available:

MSP libraries: core datafile fs strings io

Others: sigc++-2.0

Since the MSP libraries are also normally built with Builder, the script will
need to have their sources available.  By default, it will look at the parent
directory of builder.  You can change this by setting the LIBPATH evironment
variable for the script.  If everything goes well, you should have a
builder-stage1 binary that you can use to build a normal version of Builder.


3. Using Builder to build projects

In the simplest and most common case, Builder is invoked in the package's root
directory without any arguments.  An arbitary working directory may be
specified with -C, or an alternative Build file with -f.

To build a subset of the targets known to the package, the desired targets can
be named on the command line.  Note that if -C is used, the targets will be
interpreted relative to that directory, not the one where Builder is invoked
from.

To change package configuration, arguments of the form key=value may be given.
By default they will only affect the current package, but with the -A switch,
all active packages may be configured at once.


4. Using Builder in your project

To use Builder, you need to create a Build file that tells what it should
build.  This file defines two main types of entities: packages and components.
usually there is only one package definition in a Build file.

The Build file uses a C-like structured language.  It consists of statements
and blocks.  Statements are terminated with a semicolon (';').  Blocks are
enclosed in braces ('{' and '}').  If a statement contains a block of
substatements, the semicolon comes after the closing brace.

For a simple example, look at Builder's own Build file.


5. License

Builder is copyright © 2006-2008  Mikko Rasa, Mikkosoft Productions

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along
with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc.,
51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301 USA.