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Peacock

Software for building external projects.

Most software depends on external software. When building such software, those external software packages must be installed first. Often they are installed already or can be installed easily using package managers. Sometimes this is not the case, though.

This project tries to make it easy to install specific versions of external software. It uses CMake to manage the builds. Here is an example command for building the latest version of Boost supported by Peacock:

cd /tmp/peacock-build
cmake -Dpeacock_prefix=/opt/peacock -Dbuild_boost=true <path_to>/peacock
make

This command will configure, build and install Boost. The results will be installed to a directory below /opt/peacock. Projects using Boost can point their build script to this directory. The name of the installation directory reflects the target platform of the build, so multiple builds of the same package but for different target platforms can co-exist in the same prefix location.

Usage

Peacock consists of a collection of CMake script files that manage the build of requested software packages. The first thing to do is to configure the Peacock build. At the very least you need to tell Peacock which packages you want to build. Packages can be selected by passing -Dbuild_<package>=true to the cmake command. This will add the package to the build. Most packages allow you to tweak their builds by passing additional, package-specific, configuration options. All packages support the <package>_version option to select one of the supported versions. If you don't ask for a specific version of a package, Peacock will select the latest version that it knows of. Here is an example of building boost version 1.56:

cmake -Dbuild_boost=true -Dboost_version=1.56.0 <path_to>/peacock

In general, Peacock builds packages with optional features turned off. If you need a specific feature, you have to explicitly ask for it. For example, here is an example of building Boost with support for the unit testing framework:

cmake -Dbuild_boost=true -Dboost_build_boost_test=true <path_to>/peacock

General options

variable description
peacock_download_dir Directory for downloaded files
peacock_prefix Directory for installing files
peacock_verbose Print extra (debug) output

As described above, the prefix directory is the root of a directory tree where the software is installed. This tree is named after host and target architecture, and is unique for each combination thereof. This way, a single prefix directory can contain software built for various target architectures. An example directory layout looks like this:

<peacock_prefix>
    /linux
        /linux
            /gcc-4
                /x86_32
                    /{bin,include,lib,...}
                /x86_64
                    /{bin,include,lib,...}
    /linux
        /windows
            /mingw-4
                /x86_32
                    /{bin,include,lib,...}
                /x86_64
                    /{bin,include,lib,...}
    /windows
        /windows
            /mingw-4
                /x86_32
                    /{bin,include,lib,...}
                /x86_64
                    /{bin,include,lib,...}

A CMake script is provided that determines the name of the target-platform specific directory. This script can be used to configure projects using the 3rd party software. More documentation can be found in the README.md.

Peacock will pick up $CC and $CXX, and forward them to the build scripts of the packages.

Package-specific options

Package-specific options are documented in the package-specific documentation.

Platform-specific notes

Windows, Mingw-w64

On Windows, CMake will always pick up the most recent version of Microsoft Visual Studio, if you have it installed. You can get around this by explicitly selecting the CMake generator of your choice (cmake -G <generator>).

Examples

Linux, GCC

cmake \
    -Dpeacock_download_dir=~/tmp/peacock-downloads \
    -Dpeacock_prefix=$HOME/Desktop/peacock \
    -Dbuild_boost=true <path_to>/peacock

Windows, Mingw-w64, Cygwin Bash shell

cmake \
    -G "Unix Makefiles" \
    -DCMAKE_MAKE_PROGRAM=mingw32-make \
    -Dpeacock_download_dir=c:/Cygwin/home/<user>/tmp/peacock_downloads \
    -Dpeacock_prefix="c:/Users/<user>/Desktop/peacock" \
    -Dbuild_boost=true <path_to>/peacock