C/C Actors

Note this document is under construction --Guillaume CHATELET 12:40, 18 July 2008 (EDT)

Purpose

While trying to use Buckminster for both my Java and C++ projects, I realized that Java projects within Eclipse were pretty straightforward but C/C++ projects were much more difficult to manage.

Why is it so hard ?

Component materialization is much harder in non Java environments because :

• Java projects dependencies are automatically described by the Eclipse plugin framework (so Buckminster create CSpecs for you)
  • Contrary to the C/C++ projects for which you have to write them.
• compiling, testing, your code requires to execute programs from outside ( shell scripts, compiler, unit tests and so forth ).
• some of the resources you need to materialize are libraries that are only available as zipped url resources.
  • which implies you have to download and unzip them : Buckminster cannot do that for the moment despites its exactly what you expect it to do.

Work flow currently used

The toolchain I created to manage C/C++ projects dependencies is as follows :

• Create Spec components to describe dependencies
• Specify actions like build / clean / rebuild
  • those actions have prerequisites pointing to other components (eg: the path to the libTiff include folder)
• Write ant scripts called from buckminster to
  • retrieve libraries from urls or retrieve files from archives pointed by url
  • execute commands with specific environment variables (eg. calling the compiler with paths to libraries)
    • those environments variables are retrieved from Buckminster's action's prerequisites section via Ant actor API (Buckminster)
• Create the script to compile the code ( Makefile or Boost Jamfile or SCons file )

Proposal

This page is a proposal to extends Buckminster's actor in order to bring users from the non Java world a better experience in executing actions like

• downloading resources from the web
• executing shell scripts