DependencyBuilder

Builds dependencies for your C++ application on Linux and Windows

Motivation

For a commercial C++ application be deployed, it needs at minimum a collection of common libraries (dependencies) and an up-to-date set of building tools. However the variety of environments - machines and operating systems - is so distinct from each other that one has no choice other than building all libraries by themselves.

Of course, there are many package builders out there:

1. The distributions themselves (Ubuntu, Redhat, Debian, Suse, Gentoo, ArchLinux)
2. Integrated build systems (Conan, Pkgsrc, vcpkg, etc)

Every one of these above have done their work to create binaries. However every single one has problems. The distributions are limited, in particular Redhat and Windows. Conan offers a build system but it becomes quickly a dependency hell. I like pkgsrc but it is strictly FreeBSD - it's a pain to make it work even on Ubuntu. vcpkg is Microsoft, which draws a line that I dont want to cross. There are others but they are "open source" but do not follow the OSS principles; in the sense they have a business behind it driving them. With open business source, things are engineered such that everything is dandy until you hit an unsolvable glitch and you have to pay them to solve it. Not sure about you, I dont see myself willingfully walking into a trap.

The approach is then to "borrow" the build formulas and patches from other distros and create something very simple and customizable without marrying a business.

These are my minimal set of features:

1. Bash only. No Ruby, Python or any custom languages
2. Be easy to understand and maintain
3. Have basic functionality (download, compile) but still provide an easy mechanism for overriding with a completely custom script (see bzip2 for an example)
4. Maintain a cache of tarballs so not to overwhelm my internet connection
5. Build everything in a single batch, no need to be keeping versions
6. Produce an installation folder that can be zipped and included in your commercial application then shipped to a client

Supported Architectures

For version 1.0 we intend to provide support for the major commercial distributions, Redhat and Ubuntu on Linux and Windows 10. For now we are supporting Intel x86_64 but that can change in the future as other platforms are certified.

TODO

1. Update the MSYS/Windows folder
2. Setup some sort of automated build with docker in aws (EKS or Amazon Batch)
3. Review and clean up the current code