Author - Copyright (C) 2014-2021, 2023 Mark Grant
1 ... Project Description
2 ... AutoTools (configure and make) Installation
3 ... Installation of Distro-Native Packages
4 ... Utility Scripts
This project produces a helper script for AutoTools projects. It has two main goals; to reduce repetitive typing of some AutoTools commands, and, to afford a more standard interface for the programmer across AutoTools projects.
At the command line level the script offers it's own options and provides that all other arguments are passed unparsed and untouched straight to the configure command line. For example:-
acmbuild --config .. sysconfdir=/etc -- --prefix=/usr
In this case --config is an acmbuild option to configure the project, .. is the base directory and everything else is passed untouched to configure, invoking:-
../configure sysconfdir=/etc --prefix=/usr
thereby obviously supporting environment variable setting and option passing for configure.
The acmbuild options come in two flavours; action options and enabling options.
b, c, C, D, g, K, m and T are action options. -b, for instance will run make, whereas -D will run make dist.
The rest, (apart from help and version), are enabling options. Invariably these are implemented merely by passing an enable argument to configure. For example
acmbuild --config --debug ..
will run
configure --enable-debug=yes
That is all. For it to be meaningful the developer must process this argument in configure. The script does not know if the option is sensible, or indeed, if it is supported by configure, so, in the above example, if the developer had not written code in configure to process this argument, configure will issue a warning and then just ignore the option.
As an example of the simplification this script affords, the following acmbuild command
acmbuild -cb .
will run
autoreconf -if .
./configure (plus options)
make (plus options)
The project functionality is implemented as two scripts; acmbuild and bootstrap.sh. acmbuild does nothing more than invoke bootstrap.sh with the same arguments. This means that all the functionality is in bootstrap.sh. On project install both scripts are installed but only acmbuild is installed in the PATH. So all usage is via acmbuild. The reason for this is that it enables a secondary usage of bootstrap.sh. bootstrap.sh can be copied and pasted into the project-root of all AutoTools project to provide a simplified and standardised build bootstrap as is generally recommended. This eliminates any possible confusion as to which version of bootstrap.sh is being used whilst also obviating any dependency on this project.
acmbuild -b [-c [-a] [-A] [{--CC=COMPILER|-s}] [-d] [-H] [-m] [-t] [-v]]
[-g] [-K] [-pX] [-- PASS_THRU_OPTIONS ...]
acmbuild -c [-a] [-A] [{--CC=COMPILER|-s}] [-d] [-H] [-m] [-pX] [-t] [-v]
[-- PASS_THRU_OPTIONS ...]
acmbuild -c {-i|-S} [--CC=COMPILER] [-pX] [-v] [-- PASS_THRU_OPTIONS ...]
acmbuild {-C|-D|-T} [-c] [-g] [-pX] [-- PASS_THRU_OPTIONS ...]
acmbuild -g [-b]
[-c [-a] [-A] [{--CC=COMPILER|-s}] [-d] [-H] [-m] [-t] [-v]]
[-K] [-pX] [-- PASS_THRU_OPTIONS ...]
acmbuild {-h|-V}
acmbuild -K [-b]
[-c [-a] [-A] [{--CC=COMPILER|-s}] [-d] [-H] [-m] [-t] [-v]]
[-g] [-pX] [-- PASS_THRU_OPTIONS ...]
acmbuild [OPTIONS] [-- PASS_THRU_OPTIONS ...]
The script offers the following options:-
-a, --at-only
during testing and for an AutoTools-only install, some build
changes are required. e.g. You may reference an external Java
jar in datadir but in AT builds and installations this may ex‐
pand to /usr/local/share... So a substitution is required for
this scenario.
-A, --analyzer
enable compiler analyzer output.
-b, --build
make the project.
-c, --config
configure the project.
-C, --distcheck
perform a normal make distcheck.
--CC compiler
Specify a compiler to use. Functionally equivalent to:-
bootstrap.sh -c . -- CC=compiler
More ephemerally, as a one-off you can use:-
make CC=compiler
-d, --debug
build with appropriate debug flags.
-D, --dist
perform a make dist.
-g, --gnulib
run gnulib-tool --update. Checks for the existence of the cache
file proj-root/m4/gnulib-cache.m4. If it does not exist the up‐
date is not run.
-h, --help
prints usage information.
-H, --header-check
show include stack depth
-i, --iwyu
Run clang's include-what-you-use to analyse header file usage.
include-what-you-use invokes the clang compiler, so this option
automatically sets clang as the compiler and requires that op‐
tion c is specified.
-K, --check
run make check
-m, --config-menu
invoke menu of configurable options. The only thing fixed is the
script name, configurable-options.sh in the project root direc‐
tory. Usually this would be expected to have a dialog interface.
-p[X], --parallel-jobs[=X]
if X is specified then make runs with X parallel jobs. If X is
not specified then make will run with the same number of jobs as
processors. If this option is not specified then make runs se‐
quentially.
-s, --sparse
pass --enable-sparse=yes to configure.
-S, --scan-build
Run clang's scan-build static analyser.
-t, --testing-hacks
some build changes may be required for testing purposes. e.g. A
script may invoke a project jar file which when installed will
be somewhere under datadir, but during testing it is in the
project tree.
-T, --source-tarball
perform a make srctarball to build a source tarball.
-v, --verbose
emit extra information
-V, --version
prints version information
-- PASS_THRU_OPTIONS The -- stops processing command line arguments and
instead passes subsequent arguments on, as-is, to AutoTools
At a source modification / development level, this project expects to reside in a git environment. This manifests itself in 2 places:-
- ... .gitignore files are included in the source.
- ... The make target, 'srctarball', relies on the command 'git archive' so it will fail if git is not installed or it is not in a git repository.
a) ... Download either the source or distribution tarball (the .tar.gz file) from:-
https://github.com/m-grant-prg/acmbuild/releases
b) ... Extract the tarball preserving the directory structure.
c) ... cd to the directory created.
d) ... If you downloaded the source tarball type 'autoreconf -if'
e) ... Type './configure'
f) ... As root or sudo, type 'make install clean'
(Quote marks are for textual clarity only).
To uninstall the package:
1 ... cd to the directory created in the above install process.
2 ... As root or sudo, type 'make uninstall clean'
Installation packages native to different distributions are available, please refer to the relevant installation section on the wiki at:-
https://github.com/m-grant-prg/acmbuild/wiki
In the project root directory there is 1 helper script; bootstrap.sh.
This misleadingly named script bootstraps the project build and provides other useful features. The main script options are probably b, c, C, D and T.
In AutoTools it is usually advisable to perform parallel builds. This means you build somewhere other than the project root. This is because building creates files and they would confuse the project root downwards. I always create a build directory straight off the project root, cd to there and do all build and git work from there, (.gitignore is already set to ignore such a directory).
Assuming you adopt the preceding paragraph then a typical invocation of the script would be:-
../bootstrap.sh --config --build ..
The last '..' points the way to project root.
For the full list of arguments to bootstrap.sh please look at the acmbuild options section above.