Modular Build System

Overview

Cmake, while a very useful tool, has some flaws. Namely, it requires a very verbose specification of the build configuration. While this allows for significant control of what is happening, it is often more work to setup for complex projects. This is where Modular Build System, or MBS, is useful. MBS allows the developer to group their code into modules. Each module contains cpp and h files, is either a library or executable binary, and can depend on other modules. When a module depends on another, the headers of the latter module are available to the former, and the former will be linked with the latter (if the former is a library, then linking the former also links the latter, transitively). The developer can then run MBS to convert the module specification in YAML to cmake code, that can then be included in a cmake project. This allows the high-level specification of MBS to be easily used with the low-level details of cmake, while simultaneously taking advantage of cmake's support for many different build environments.

Usage

The next section gives instructions for getting MBS on your system. Documentation on how to use MBS once it's intalled is available in USAGE.md, in the root of the project.

Building

In MBS, the modules are specified in a mbs.yml file that then needs to be converted to a cmake file to be included in a cmake project to build. Because, presumably, the users of MBS won't have it installed until they can build it, the cmake representation is tracked in version control, to allow MBS to be built without already having MBS installed. Other projects using MBS should not do this, and instead should .gitignore (or otherwise) the cmake output from MBS. Because MBS includes the cmake file in version control, all that is necessary to build MBS is a recursive clone then a standard cmake build procedure:

git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/john01dav/mbs.git
mkdir mbs/build -p
cd mbs/build
cmake .. -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
make -j8

All of MBS's dependencies are included in the repository via git submodules, or are in the C++17 standard library. A compiler with C++17 (namely, the filesystem library) support is required to build MBS. The provided cmake files for building MBS are only tested with GCC and Clang on Linux, however they should work for all other GCC-compatible compilers. The CMakeLists.txt file may need to be changed to support non-GCC-compatible compilers (ie. MSVC), however the code should be compatible with all C++17 compliant compilers.

Installation on Arch Linux

MBS is available in the Arch Linux User Repository (aur) under the name mbs-git. This AUR package is maintained by a third party and unofficial with respect to both Arch Linux and MBS, and neither makes any claims regarding its veracity or lack of malicious code.