a software build system, using GNU make, for C/C++ and web apps that serve HTML, javascript, and CSS.
This is being developed on GNU/Linux systems: Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, and Debain 8 and 9.
In short, quickbuild uses files suffix rules to build files from source via GNU make.
quickbuild is currently not intended to port code between operating systems.
Some familiarly with GNU make and bash is required to use it.
Some of the make variables it defines and uses are like those in GNU automake.
If your software project builds binary executables and/or libraries from C and/or C++ source files quickbuild will create a directory named qb_build in each build/source directory where a binary is built.
You only need the one file, quickbuild.make, in the top of your source directory tree. Include the quickbuild.make in your software project, or get it from a bootstrap script in your software project that downloads it.
For example:
wget https://raw.github.com/lanceman2/quickbuild/master/quickbuild.make
or for a given commit
wget https://raw.github.com/lanceman2/quickbuild/FULL_GIT_HASH/quickbuild.make
where FULL_GIT_HASH is the full lower case hex encoded git hash for the commit, like 1e98252310917008b3a8fb675539e7df435d7b9b, or a tag like 0.1
At your option quickbuild can build yours packages in directories that are separate from the source tree, like CMake and GNU autotools do. You can run:
make BUILD_PREFIX=../MY_BUILD
in the top source directory to generate a build directory tree in
../MY_BUILD
You can cd (change your working directory) to
../MY_BUILD
and run
make
to build the code there.
You cannot make a separate build tree for a source tree that you have already built the source in. Trying to do so will cause GNU make to use built files that are in the source, and mix them will files built files in the build tree. You may as well stir the code with a stick.
Currently quickbuild is one make file that is included at the bottom of all your make files. Being so seems to limit quickbuild so that package options that effect the make files at first pass can't be used. For example the package can't add an option that optionally excludes sub directories via a make conditional directive.
GNUmakefile is used as the file name of the make files because we use GNU make make extensions and these make files will only work with GNU make.
There are examples in the examples directory. These examples also serve as a development test suite. Each sub directory in examples is a complete package that uses quickbuild, but needs the file quickbuild.make copied to it. This is the best place to see how to use the quickbuild software package build system. You can run 'make test' in the examples directory to build and test all the example packages.
Each examples directory contains a script file names test, which is particular to this test suite and is not part of the example package. The examples do not need this, test, file to be working package examples.
If you wish to make independent working package examples in the examples directory run
make quickbuild_copies
to copy the quickbuild.make file and complete all the example packages; or just copy quickbuild.make to the top of all the example package directory yourself.
The top examples directory cannot be built in an alternate build directory, like the example projects sub-directories can, because it's subdirectories are setup like independent software projects, so that each example (subdirectory) can stand on it's own as an independent project.
We intend to keep the compressed (comments and blanks lines removed) copy of quickbuild.make by under 1000 lines. 2019 May 20 compressed line count is 458 with 909 before compressing (tagged 0.1).