Moderncli is a package that collects and centralizes testing for many of my inline C++ header libraries, which I had duplicated or vendored in other packages in the past. These headers are being gathered under a common package of their own that can then be installed as a core dependency. Hence, one interpretation for this package is "Modern C++" Library Interfaces. Moderncli is meant to support C++ 17 or later.

Moderncli headers are meant to be usable stand-alone and provide generic cross-platform low level wrappers around common system features and services. This makes it easier to include just what you need without drawing in additional headers you may not be using. This also makes it easy to substitute other common C++ libraries without having to include duplication functionality from moderncli.

Moderncli requires CMake to build the testing framework. It should build and work with GCC (9 or later), with Clang (14? or later), and MSVC. Besides GNU/Linux and BSD systems, Moderncli is portable to and can support the MingW platform target as installed by Debian when selecting posix runtime, and even native MS Visual Studio builds. The minimum requirement is a C++17 compiler (or later) that supports the C++ filesystem header and runtime library.

Moderncli and applications also often make use of the C++ library libfmt. This is preferred over the use of std::format because it is much smaller when used in multiple applications as a shared library, which std::format does not support, and it is better optimized. However if you do not use the Moderncli print.hpp header in your own applications you do not require libfmt either.

Moderncli also uses openssl for crypto operations and any crypto related headers. Generally it should only require libcrypto from openssl, though future work on streaming may also use libssl for secure socket streams. In addition, C++ thread support may have to be enabled to use C++ thread operations. The cmake/features.cmake file shows how to test for and enable these dependencies correctly from CMake.

Distributions of this package are provided as detached source tarballs made from a tagged release from our internal source repository. These stand-alone detached tarballs can be used to make packages for many GNU/Linux systems, and for BSD ports. They may also be used to build and install the software directly on a target platform.

The latest public release source tarball can be found at either https://www.tychosoft.com/tychosoft/-/packages/generic/moderncli or thru an auto-generated tarball from the projects public gitlab repository.

I package this project primarily for Alpine Linux. There is no reason this cannot easily be packaged for use on other distributions, for BSD ports, etc, as well.

This project is offered as free (as in freedom) software for public use and has a public project page at https://www.gitlab.com/tychosoft/moderncli which has an issue tracker where you can submit public bug reports, a wiki for hosting project documentation, and a public git repository. Patches and merge requests may be submitted in the issue tracker or thru email. Support requests and other kinds of inquiries may also be sent thru the tychosoft gitlab help desktop service. Other details about participation may be found in the Contributing page.

There is a testing program for each header. These run simple tests that will be expanded to improve code coverage over time. The test programs are the only build target making this library by itself, and the test programs in this package work with the cmake ctest framework. They may also be used as simple examples of how a given header works. There is also a lint target that can be used to verify code changes.