This project is a minimalistic, simplistic and stupid implementation of a port/recipe system for developers.
Another port system, srsly?
No, is not a general port system, is not aimed to take over apt, macports or anything like that.
The rationale is simple.
You create a library A that uses B at runtime or compile time. Target audience of your library might have different versions of B installed than yours.
You know, Works on my machine is not what you expect from one developer to another.
Developers having problems report them back to you, and what you do then? Compile B locally, replacing your existing installation of B or simply hacking things around so nothing breaks.
All this, manually.
Computers are tools, are meant to help us, not the other way around.
What if I tell you the above scenario can be simplified with something like this:
rake compile B_VERSION=1.2.3
And your library will use the version of B you specified. Done.
You make it sound easy, where is the catch?
You got me, there is a catch. At this time (and highly likely will be always) MiniPortile is only compatible with GCC compilers and autoconf/configure-based projects.
It assumes the library you want to build contains a configure script, which all the autoconf-based libraries do.
How to use
Now that you know the catch, and you’re still reading this, let me show you a quick example:
require "mini_portile"
recipe = MiniPortile.new("libiconv", "1.13.1")
recipe.files = ["http://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/libiconv/libiconv-1.13.1.tar.gz"]
recipe.cook
recipe.activate
That’s all. cook will download, extract, patch, configure and compile the library into a namespaced structure. activate ensures GCC find this library and prefers it over a system-wide installation.
Structure
At this time, if you haven’t digged into the code yet, are wondering what is all that structure talk about?.
MiniPortile follows the principle of convention over configuration and established a folder structure where is going to place files and perform work.
Take the above example, and let’s draw some picture:
mylib
|-- ports
| |-- archives
| | `-- libiconv-1.13.1.tar.gz
| `-- <platform>
| `-- libiconv
| `-- 1.13.1
| |-- bin
| |-- include
| `-- lib
`-- tmp
`-- <platform>
`-- ports
In above structure, platform refers to the architecture that represents the operating system you’re using (e.g. i686-linux, i386-mingw32, etc).
Inside this folder, MiniPortile will store the artifacts that result from the compilation process. As you cans see, it versions out the library so you can run multiple version combination without compromising these overlap each other.
archives is where downloaded source files are stored. It is recommended you avoid trashing that folder so no further downloads will be required (save bandwidth, save the world).
The tmp is where compilation is performed and can be safely discarded.
Don’t worry, you don’t need to know the path structure by memory, just use recipe’s path to obtain the full path to the installation directory:
recipe.cook recipe.path # => /home/luis/projects/myapp/ports/i686-linux/libiconv/1.13.1
How can I combine this with my compilation task?
In the simplified proposal, the idea is that using Rake, your compile task depends on MiniPortile compilation and most important, activation.
Take the following as a simplification of how you can use MiniPortile with Rake:
task :libiconv do
recipe = MiniPortile.new("libiconv", "1.13.1")
recipe.files = ["http://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/libiconv/libiconv-1.13.1.tar.gz"]
checkpoint = ".#{recipe.name}-#{recipe.version}.installed"
unless File.exist?(checkpoint)
recipe.cook
touch checkpoint
end
recipe.activate
end
task :compile => [:libiconv] do
# ...
end
This example will:
-
Compile the library only once (using a timestamp file)
-
Ensure compiled library gets activated every time
-
Make compile task depend on compiled library activation
For your homework, you can make libiconv version be taken from ENV variables.
Native or cross-compilation
Above examples cover the normal use case: compile support libraries natively.
MiniPortile also covers another use case, which is the cross-compilation of the support libraries to be used as part of a binary gem compilation.
It is the perfect complementary tool for rake-compiler and it’s cross Rake task.
Depending on your usage of rake-compiler, you will need to use host to match the installed cross-compiler toolchain.
Please refer to the examples directory for simplified and practical usage.
Supported scenarios
As mentioned before, MiniPortile requires a GCC compiler toolchain. This has been tested against Ubuntu, OSX and even Windows (RubyInstaller with DevKit)
Disclaimer
If you have any trouble, don’t hesitate to contact the author. As always, I’m not going to say Use at your own risk because I don’t want this library to be risky.
If you trip on something, I’ll share the liability by repairing things as quickly as I can. Your responsibility is to report the inadequacies.
License
This library is licensed under MIT license. Please see LICENSE.txt for details.