cm

"cm" is a new tool for build automation and compilation management. It addresses a number of shortcomings I see in make.

Features:

• A clean syntax based on a context-free language description
• Whitespace insensitivity
• Distinct macros and variables
• Separate procedure and production namespaces
• Many native programming constructs such as foreach loops for easy iteration, and more powerful tools such as anonymous functions with static scoping.
• Built-in support for recursive directory handling without additional invocations of 'cm'.
• An intelligent, automatic configuration file generator
• Pre-generated functions for handling common build tasks in a platform-independent manner
• Support for multiple build configurations and multi-pass builds over complicated directory hierarchies

Licensing

cm is released as open-source software under the GNU GPL license, version 2. You are free to use and modify cm as you see fit, so long as attribution and the original copyright notice are maintained. Only unmodified versions, however, may be properly called "cm".

Disclaimer

This is Free Software -- there is no warranty, expressed or implied. What you do with this software is AT YOUR OWN RISK. Furthermore, this is an early release of cm and is considered BETA SOFTWARE (at best) -- if it contains bugs, I will try to fix them, but no promises on speed, accuracy, etc. That having been said, I use cm to build all of my projects, and so far have not encountered any problems.

Downloading

You can download cm from this website. It requires an additional library of classes named classlib, also available here, and the Boehm garbage collection library, a free garbage collector for C/C++. Future versions may eliminate their dependency on the garbage collector. Note that the garbage collector requires the libc6 version of LinuxThreads. MIT pthreads and older implementations may not work correctly. (cm uses multithreading for parallel compilation; if you do not use the -j option, this will not be a problem.)

• Download cm (Linux; v0.5.1)
• Download classlib (Linux; v0.1)

Installation instructions:

• Download cm, classib, and gc.
• Install the garbage collector per the included instructions. (Basically ./configure; make; sudo make install.) When running configure, you will need to pass it the parameters: --prefix=/usr/lib --with-threads=posix.
• Unzip classlib (tar vzxf classlib.tar.gz).
• Configure classlib's Makefile with any paths you need to modify.
• Build and install classlib with make && sudo make install.
• Unzip cm (tar vzxf cm.tar.gz).
• Configure the install targets for cm by modifying install.conf.
• Build and install cm with make && sudo make install.
• You may need to set LD_LIBRARY_PATH or run ldconfig to initialize the .so files.
• To verify your cm installation, you can rebuild it with the included Cmrules files by typing cm @clean && cm -m opt in the same directory you built cm in with make.

Classlib and cm do not support an autoconf-guided build. If you install to your own home directory, you do not need to sudo the installation. It's on the list...

Documentation is included in the docs/ subdirectory; the file manual.ps contains a thorough introduction to cm. Good luck!

Feedback, suggestions, improvements (patches and the like) can be sent to Aaron Kimball: ak at cs dot washington dot edu.