Chicken Builder

This bundle contains a makefile generator and a convenient wrapper around CHICKEN Scheme's module system. The module wrapper simplifies CHICKEN's module syntax and is less ambiguous, so the makefile generator can derive a dependency tree from your source code.

Usage

After successful installation, you must chdir into a directory, which contains a project conforming to the required project structure. To initialize your build and generate an extra makefile, simply run chicken-builder-init. This will create the file "build/extra.makefile" which must be included by your main makefile.

Now you can build your project using make. The all, test and clean targets are already predefined in the extra.makefile.

To prevent chicken-builder from generating rules for specific targets, you can disable them via the --skip-targets=... flag. This flag takes comma separated target names. Here are some examples:

chicken-builder-init --skip-targets=test,clean --skip-targets=foo
chicken-builder-init --skip-targets=build/foo.o,build/test/string

# Object files which belong directly to a program/test can only be
# disabled by disabling the program/test itself:
chicken-builder-init --skip-targets=build/main-program

The extra makefile will define the following variables:

• CSC - contains the full path to the csc program.
• PROGRAMS - contains paths to all programs in build/, relative to the projects root directory.
• TESTS - like PROGRAMS, but for tests in build/tests/.

The extra makefile will use the following variables if they are defined:

• CSC_FLAGS - Flags passed directly to CSC when compiling.
• CSC_LDFLAGS - Flags passed directly to CSC when linking.

Requirements and installation

CHICKEN Scheme must be installed on your system. After cloning this repository and changing into its directory, you can build and install it with the following commands:

make
make install # Eventually this command must be executed as root.

By default it will be installed to /usr/local, but you can change the installation path by setting INSTALL_PREFIX. This variable must be set before building Chicken-builder.

Uninstallation

Ensure that INSTALL_PREFIX is setup exactly like during its installation. Then run make uninstall from Chicken-builder's source directory.

Required project structure

Your project must be structured like this:

• some-project/
  • src/
  • test/
  • build/
  • Makefile

The src/ directory contains your code. Chicken-builder will search this directory for chb-modules and chb-programs to generate the extra makefile. This makefile contains all the rules needed to build your project and can be included by your main Makefile.

The test/ directory contains your unit tests. This feature implicitly depends on the test egg. Before any tests are run, chicken-builder will create the directory test/tmp/. This directory can by used by unit tests to create temporary files. If all tests pass, test/tmp/ will be removed again, so make sure not to store important data there. See chb-test for more informations.

The build/ directory will be created the first time you generate the extra makefile. It contains only build specific data which may be overwritten or removed.

The Makefile is the main makefile which will build your project and must include build/extra.makefile.

Module wrapper

Chicken-builder adds the following syntactical extensions to simplify the usage of CHICKEN's build-in module system. You can only have either chb-module, chb-program or chb-test once in a source file.

chb-module

This is pretty much like a normal CHICKEN module. The difference is, that each chb-module is also a CHICKEN unit. The dependency generator will search your src/ directory for chb-modules and generate rules to build them. The build process also ensures that all dependencies are handled properly, and takes care of *.import.scm and *.types files. Every chb-module will implicitly import chicken, scheme and chb-syntax. Chb-modules must be in the src/ directory. The module's name must be the name of the file with its extension removed and can't be named "main" or "chb-syntax".

(chb-module NAME (EXPORT ...)
  ...)

chb-program

This is similar to chb-module, but with some differences: It has no module name and the source file will not be treated as a unit. Neither *.import.scm nor *.types files will be created for chb-programs. Chicken-builder will build stand alone executables from chb-programs.

(chb-program
  ...)

chb-test

Chb-test is like chb-program, but with the difference that one must specify the name of the test as a string. Chb-tests must be in the test/ directory. Chb-test will implicitly use the test egg and wrap your code into a test-begin and test-end block. It will also call test-exit for you.

(chb-test "test name"
  ...)

chb-import

This is how you tell chicken-builder to recognize dependencies for building and linking. Chb-import combines CHICKEN's import and uses declarations with automatic dependency resolving. Circular dependencies are forbidden. Chb-import is only available inside chb-modules, chb-programs or chb-tests.

(chb-module foo
  (chb-import bar foobar)
  ...)

License

Chicken-builder was released under the zlib license.