qiBuild Python framework is designed around a few principles:
Be modular : it should be easy to extend the command line API
Have loosely-coupled, isolated components. This allows us to:
- Easily write automatic tests
- Easily refactoring code when there is a need to it.
Have a nice user interface. This means:
- Nice, helpful error messages
- Colorful output when possible
- Nice and always up-to-date built-in help
- Let the use type less when possible
Be intuitive: follow the principle of least surprise
Prefer convention over configuration: configuration files should containing nothing more that necessary, and easy to generate automatically.
qiBuild does something non-standard, though: it forces use to use the build directory it has generated for you.
This is the only way we can make sure the use will not end up mixing build directories (for instance mixing a 64 bits build directory used to compile a library for your desktop, with a build directory used when cross compiling).
Worktrees can be nested, although this is not recommended (situation can bet a little confused if you do so)
A worktree can also contain a qibuild.cfg configuration file.
The name of the project is given inside the qibuild.manifest file, like this:
[project foo]
See also
By convention, the name of the project matches the subdirectory name, (that’s what qibuild convert will do, for instance), but this is not mandatory.
Note that although qibuild comes with a tool to manage several git repositories (called qisrc), there is absolutely no problems in having a project not in a git repositories, or several projects inside the same directory.
Projects directory can be nested, but this is not recommended either.
Also note that nothing forces a qibuild project to be a CMake project.
We will just check that the project contains a root CMakeLists when running qibuild configure, but that’s all.
More specifically, we do NOT assume the project uses the qibuild CMake framework.
See also
A build configuration is just a name. Usually it matches a toolchain name, but you can also add:
- some specific CMake flags
- a specific CMake generator
A build configuration is always associated to a build directory. You cannot have two different build configurations sharing the same build directory.
See also
See also
See qiBuild Python packages documentation for a documentation of the main packges, classes and functions of the qiBuild Python Framework.
You can read the following sections if you want to understand deeply how the qibuild command line tools work under the hood.