mcbuild: A Python repository from ceronman

MCBuild: A Mono Development Version Build Script
================================================

By Manuel Cerón <ceronman@unicauca.edu.co>

Introduction
------------

MCBuild is a set of scripts that help you to build the Mono Development Version.
With MCBuild you can automatically checkout, update, compile and install Mono
and it's tools within a parallel environment as is described in 

http://www.mono-project.com/Parallel_Mono_Environments

What MCBuild does is to perform a series of operations on work copy directories
of the repository in order.

MCBuild was intended for use with Mono, but could be easily adapted to work with
any other software.

MCBuild is inspired by JHBuild (http://live.gnome.org/Jhbuild), but currently
it's much more simpler and has fewer options.

Usage
-----

First, you should edit "configuration.py" to configure MCBuild. There are three
configuration options:

INSTALL_PATH is the path where the parallel environment should be installed. You
should have write access to this directory

SOURCES_PATH is the path where the source code is going to be downloaded from
the repositories.

MODULESET_PATH is the file with information about which modules are going to be
build. Take a look to "moduleset.py" as an example of how to write a module set.
See the "Moduleset and Commands" section bellow for more information about
module sets.

Now you can use mcbuild:

./mcbuild.py [list of command]

For example:

$ ./mcbuild.py update configure compile install

This command is going to walk trough every module working copy and perform all
the commands passed as arguments. If the working copy does not exist, it
performs a checkout. See "Moduleset and Commands" Section bellow to know about
what commands you can use

You can use the --shell option to go inside the new parallel environment.
Example:

$ mono --version
Mono JIT compiler version 1.2.4 (tarball)
...
$ ./mcbuild.py --shell
$ mono --version
Mono JIT compiler version 1.9 (/trunk/ r101715)
...

Options
-------

-v, --verbose		If you want to know what is going on when the
             		commands are being executed.
-f, --from <module>	If you want to start from an specific module instead
                    	from the first one.
-t, --from <module>	If you want to build only until one module.
-p, --only <module>	If you want to build only one specific module.
-s, --shell		Start a shell inside the new Parallel Environment
-r, --run <program>	If you want to run a program from the Parallel
                   	Environment. Example: mcbuild --run monodevelop

ModuleSet and Commands
----------------------

The module set file is a list with the modules that should be build in order. A
Module should look like this:

Module(
	name = 'libgdiplus',
	repository = 'svn://anonsvn.mono-project.com/source/trunk' ,
	source_dir = '$name'
	checkout_cmd = 'svn checkout $repository/$name'
	update_cmd = 'svn update'
	configure_cmd = './autogen.sh'
	compile_cmd = 'make'
	install_cmd = 'make install'
	uninstall_cmd = 'make uninstall'
	clean_cmd = 'make clean'
	svnclean_cmd = 'svn -R revert .'
	distclean_cmd = 'make distclean'
)

Some commands are common for most cases, for example, most modules are compiled
with "make" and installed with "make install"

There are some default values for a Module:

	source_dir = '$name'
	configure_cmd = './configure'
	compile_cmd = 'make'
	install_cmd = 'make install'
	uninstall_cmd = 'make uninstall'
	clean_cmd = 'make clean'

So, unless you have a module with different commands for this actions, you can
omit them in the moduleset file. Additionally, there is a SVNModule class that
is used for subversion repositories and also defines some default values:

class SVNModule(Module):
	repository = ''
	checkout_cmd = 'svn checkout $repository/$name'
	update_cmd = 'svn update'
	configure_cmd = './autogen.sh'
	svnclean_cmd = 'svn -R revert .'

Note that you can use variable names inside commands using '$' as prefix.
Example: checkout_cmd = 'svn checkout $repository/$name'

Note that in the SVNModule class, the configure command has been overridden to
'./autogen.sh'

It's important to know that the moduleset file is a Python file. That means that
you can use any Python tricks to make your life easier.

Mono modules share the same repository, that's why it's useful to create a
MonoModule class with the repository name instead of assigning "repository" to
each module:

class MonoModule(SVNModule):
	repository = 'svn://anonsvn.mono-project.com/source/trunk'

Now we can define our libgdiplus module in a shorter way:

MonoModule(
	name = 'libgdiplus',
)

If you don't want a command to be executed within a module you can assign None
to that command. For example:

MonoModule(
	name = 'mcs',
	configure_cmd = None,
	compile_cmd = None,
	install_cmd = None,
	uninstall_cmd = None,
)

Since "mcs" is compiled from "mono", we don't want to execute any compile
command inside "mcs".

Defining new Commands
---------------------

If you need an additional command to be executed inside a working directory,
you can add it to your module using the '_cmd' sufix. Example:

MonoModule(
	name = 'mono-tools',
	cleanbackups_cmd = 'rm -rf *~'
)

In this case we defined a new cleanbackups command for erasing backup files. You
can use it in this way:

$ ./mcbuild.py cleanbackups

Note that if you define new commands, they should be defined for all modules in
your moduleset. If you want those commands to be performed only on some modules,
you should use None on the modules you don't want.
ceronman/mcbuild
